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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."
>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!
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In space, nobody can hear you scream!
I know it's pretty obligatory to say, but: DAMN! Will these NASA folks ever cease to amaze us with new, amazing, profound things? ...Kind of helps make up for all the bad stuff in the world.
I am so engaged by space exploration these days, it makes me really happy to be alive in the century I'm in.
Nothing is so smiple that it can't get screwed up.
I've been able to hear Saturn hailstorms for quite some time now...
They were recording plasma, not actual sound.
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Last month, some rain water seeped into the cable outlet box outside and for 2 days, all I could hear on my TV was the exact same sound as Saturn Hailstorm (except that the video didn't show the spacecraft travelling around saturn).
I think aliens from Saturn were trying to use me to send a message.... *smack on the head* if only I had known then..
...there is going to be one wicked-ass scratch & dent sale on astronomical probes, at Crazy Vaklav's on Saturn.
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
You can (barely) hear it on this ST: Voyager Audio Clip . It occurs at time index 1:08.
if you were standing next to it you couldn't hear anything.
I imagine that listening for particles hitting the exterior of the probe would be the last thing on your mind as your lungs explode and your blood starts to boil and your eyes start popping out of your skull like in that Schwartzenager movie.
If you read the article, you'll find out that this isn't recorded by a microphone inside the spacecraft or anything like that, but is only a representation of impact data. 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.
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.
experimental audiovideo minimalism: Rebuild All Your Ruins
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.)
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How about those bright "spots" on Titan the size of Arizona. Looks like a city to me. They say it's clouds but they don't look like the other clouds around it. Conspiracy, I say.
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was that just amazing, I just listened to it and it sounded ... so ... I can't find the word ... the wow factor ... it's like these cigarete smoke sized particles ionized by hitting against my brain directly.
I need another puff of that magic dust
You can't handle the truth.
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?
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.
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For all you Cassini watchers who own DirecTV. They recently added NASA TV to their free lineup for total choice subscribers. I noticed it about a day after the Venus transit last month.
/.ed webcast.
It has been great for keeping up with the Cassini stuff though. I had it on during the entire SOI burn. It beats the crap out of a
Excuse my ignorance, but I thought there was no sound in space?
That's just because people always wear spacesuits that block the sound. This is an unmanned probe, so the sound can come through without a problem. You'd hear the same thing if you took off your helmet while you were out there.
You see this all the time in movies: the cameras are usually outside the suits, so they can hear the whoosh of the spaceships and the zapping sounds of the lasers.
...sort of like Space Quest II!
You don't give units, but assuming you're talking MPH you're off by an order of magnitude. TFA sez:
They don't. TFA to the rescue again:
In other words, the sound is a representation of other data, slightly akin to false color images as an earlier poster pointed out.
I can understand that it's a cheap thing to just throw in there
I don't think anything with mass is cheap to add to a space probe. I don't recall what the per-kilo launch costs are for one of those things, but it's not small.
This isn't the first time NASA have had this idea -- they have tried to record actual sounds on Mars from wind blowing (and this wasn't supposed to be a simulation of the sound, like these effects are). However, the space craft with this equipment was unfortunately the Mars Polar Lander which crashed due to the infamous metric conversion mistake. :-(
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