Saturn Hailstorm

crmartin writes "NASA has released a web story about the sounds recorded aboard the Cassini spacecraft as it pased through the Rings. The story includes a Quicktime file of the hailstorm-like sounds of Ring particles impacting."

Comments

Powerful Hull?

[mfh]

>No damage was done, but it sounded exciting.

You have to give them credit. These bits of dust were going 45,000 mph! You'd think they would have decimated that antenna, but I guess not? I would have to disagree, however. To the average non-PHD, this dust sounds like nothing more than some static mixed with klinking noises. To me it sounds like SPACE DUST!

Re:Powerful Hull?

[emorphien]

Agreed, I really wouldn't have expected it to be able to fly through the rings, particularly dish forward if the video is accurate. I would think that even the small particles would erode away at it more than would be acceptable.

Obviously that's one tough schoolbus sized planet orbiting pretty picture taking probe.

Re:Powerful Hull?

[emorphien]

True, it won't affect the performance of the antenna, but with enough interstellar bugs hitting the proverbial windshield, it could wear out chunks of the structure and cause it to collapse. Now that I think about it, it's not very likely, but still there's the risk of a larger object whacking it.

Pretty cool either way, I like schoolbuses.

Re:Powerful Hull?

[Stephen Samuel]

As they said, most of these impacts are dust particles the size of cigarette smoke.

% units 'milligram-(45000mph)^2' grams-tnt
* 0.087744895
/ 11.396674

In other words, for 1 milligras dust particles, each impact would have about the kinetic force of a large cap gun cap (or a very small firecracker).

On the other hand, a 1-ounce pebble would have the kinetic force of about 5 pounds of TNT compressed into an impact point less than 1cm across..... Think hole straight tru the orbiter with lots of dead instruments.

I'm guessing that the probe designers calculated the probability of a large-particle impact, and then just made the antenna as sturdy as they could afford to.

Any other format?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone got anything OTHER than QT?

Amazing!

[DakotaSandstone]

I know it's pretty obligatory to say, but: DAMN! Will these NASA folks ever cease to amaze us with new, amazing, profound things?
I am so engaged by space exploration these days, it makes me really happy to be alive in the century I'm in. ...Kind of helps make up for all the bad stuff in the world.

Star Trek: Voyager Intro

[prakslash]

If you watch the intro sequence of ST: Voyager, you will notice that, during one of the scenes, the camera slowly cuts through the cryslline ice particles that make up the rings of Saturn. They put in a sound-effect to show what it would feel like. I always liked that sound. It was like being bathed by sounds of thousands little dusty bells tinkling.

You can (barely) hear it on this ST: Voyager Audio Clip . It occurs at time index 1:08.

Re:Why would anyone want to listen to this anyway?

[f-matic]

For fans of experimental music, this kind of "field recording" isn't that far removed from other practitioners in the field who utilize recordings of atmospheric phenomena as the basis of audio pieces, sometimes processed, sometimes just left in the raw unfiltered recordings. As someone who counts himself a fan of the work of labels like Mego and Antiopic , this recording isn't too far from the kind of stuff I would gladly add to my over-burdened record collection.

For some samples of people working with this kind of source material, check out these two artists:

Joyce Hinterding -- Australian cross media artist working in part with ecordings of magnetic fields and weather satellites.

Steven Mcgreevy -- VLF (Very Low Frequency) recordins of atmospheric phenomena -- very beautiful, with audio samples available from the site.

Re:Sound in Space?

[Stephen Samuel]

My first reaction was "They put a friggin microphone on a spacecraft (with my second being 'and it worked??!!").
Then I read the article and found out that they were recording the em pulses resulting from the space dust being turned to plasma by the force of the impact.

As for the high gain antenna being that tough --- yeah. they seem to have designed it that way... Remember that they turned the bus (er, spacecraft) to use the antenna as a shield as they went thru the gap.It makes sense to put an extra 1/4" of armor on the antenna, since it's the biggest target on the craft and it has a really low ratio of fragile parts to block of metal (the only fragile parts I can think of would be the radio pickup and the cables... These probably got extra armor.

It's the same kind of design they put into APCs and tanks -- put the extra armor where you're most likely to get hit, then try and take any hits there. (if you're ever unfortunte enough to have to take out an APC, don't bother shooting at the front, where they have a couple extra inches of armor. Aim at the sides.)

Dust cloud width

[hlub]

I would have expected a much narrower peak in the dust distribution - sounding rather like a short "swoosh" - given the thickness of the rings which is less than 1 km according to most estimates.

Could anyone explain why the observed dust cloud was so much wider?

Bang a gong.

[twitter]

That is, if someone wanted to make the impacts sound like bells, or cow moos or dog barks, those would be equally as valid representations as the "hail" sounding impacts.

That might give you a better impresion of what your space ship would sound like as you passed the rings if you used dogs or cows for your hull.

When I imagine the puffs of plasma translating into vibrations that might be heard by a traveler, I get something more like what was presented.

uhhhmmm

[ShadowRage]

the dust would be more damaging if the probe were statically sitting there, like absolutely still.
or if the space craft were going against the particles. however, it's prollygoing either just a little slower or faster than the particles, so the speed of them hitting it is somewhere in the hundreds range to the thousand range.

I still have troubles fathoming...

[clifgriffin]

The fact that we have these complex machines doing our bidding a few million miles away.

Absolutely incredible.