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Tune in to Titan

Posted by michael on from the channel-143656335 dept.

Scarblac writes "In a little over four days, the Cassini spacecraft will finally do its first flyby of Titan, the first of 46 such flybys planned for the coming years. There will be a broadcast on NASA TV. Titan is one of the most interesting objects in the solar system, the only moon with a substantial atmosphere. A few months ago, Cassini was able to spot details of Titan's surface from far away. It should be able to improve on this dramatically - what will be discovered this time?"

25 comments

  1. The link is wrong by Philom · · Score: 5, Informative

    You mean http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm.

    1. Re:The link is wrong by argan0n · · Score: 2, Funny

      How the heck does an 's' get in there instead of and 'l'? handed-dyslexia?

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      argan0n
  2. ahh memories by DrKyle · · Score: 2, Funny

    I wonder if they'll find a Kraken.

    1. Re:ahh memories by Moby+Cock · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      Yeah man! Harry Hamlin is da bomb.

  3. beer? by thhamm · · Score: 4, Informative

    nice. some info about Titan, and Saturn itself at Solarviews.

    might be interesting. maybe i can finally do my extraterrestrial beerbrewing there. :P

  4. Wow @ that image of details... by Silverlancer · · Score: 1

    I always assumed that Titan's atmosphere (like Venus's) would prevent any view of the surface... look who was wrong :O

    1. Re:Wow @ that image of details... by CheshireCatCO · · Score: 3, Informative

      You weren't. We can't see the surface, not in the visible. The pictures were taken in the infrared. (Earth-based radar has also been used.)

      Venus's surface has also been mapped from orbit (by Magellen) using radar. And, of course, the Venera landers got some pictures very small bits of the surface.

      So all in all, they're pretty equivelent.

    2. Re:Wow @ that image of details... by snake_dad · · Score: 1

      It prevents almost any view. There are a few wavelenghts that are not filtered by the atmosphere, and precisely those are used to obtain surface images (hopefully).

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  5. huygens by thhamm · · Score: 4, Insightful

    now correct me if im wrong (too lazy to google):

    taking the moon, venus and mars, this would be (only) the 4th extraterrestrial body we land a probe on. if huygens succeeds.

    aah. now get me as stunning results as the mars rovers did. and launch the JIMO.

    maybe were really "sending probes out here since the 70s and then suddenly everything goes whacko" . well. except the monolith. .)

    1. Re:huygens by Gogo+Dodo · · Score: 1

      I can think of a 5th lander, though it wasn't designed to be a lander. NEAR Shoemaker landed on the asteroid Eros.

    2. Re:huygens by Ford+Prefect · · Score: 2, Informative

      Not exactly a lander, but there's the Galileo atmospheric probe which parachuted into Jupiter in late 1995.

      While a successful mission, it (slightly disappointingly) didn't have any kind of camera on it . Although any pictures would almost certainly have been devoid of contrast or detail and would have overwhelmed the probe's limited communications capacity, they might have given the imagination a bit more to latch on to than the abstract instrumentation data that was returned. Probably why few people seem to have heard of this intriguing little side-mission...

      Fortunately, the Huygens probe has some decent cameras. Judging by the demonstrations shown on BBC2's Horizon last night, expect full panoramic views of the atmosphere and surface of Titan, for assembling into 3D flyovers. Hooray!

      Actually, a large, camera-laden spacecraft did enter the atmosphere of Jupiter more recently, but I don't think it returned too much data. It was the deliberate destruction of the main Galileo orbiter itself. ;-)

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  6. What will be discovered? by leonbrooks · · Score: 3, Funny
    what will be discovered this time?
    A big black monolith. It will turn out to be the external component of the aliens' split-system air conditioner.
    --
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  7. got me by thhamm · · Score: 1

    did i say extraterr. *body*? damn. :)

  8. daisy ... by thhamm · · Score: 1

    *eek* you talking about monoliths and having a sig "daves back!". please! dont do it dave! *shiver*

  9. Playing with Celestia by Mike+Whitney · · Score: 2, Interesting

    OK, while playing with Celestia I came up with a closest approach distance of ~940km (to surface) at about 08:37 PDT on 10/26. I have no idea of the accuracy of the orbital elements for Cassini in Celestia, or what corrections might alo be planned. It's really cool to watch the approach at 10x speed though.

    I assume the NASATV scedule takes into account transmission delays (both speed-of-light and possible store and forward delays through the deep space network), so that doesn't sound too far off by schedule.

  10. Hmmm... black monolith theme for LXer? by leonbrooks · · Score: 1

    D'ya think Dave Whitinger would pick up on it? (-:

    --
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    1. Re:Hmmm... black monolith theme for LXer? by thhamm · · Score: 1

      Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over. :)

  11. Red Dwarf - Titan by tod_miller · · Score: 1

    To Ganymede and Titan,
    Yes, sir, I've been around,
    But there ain't no place
    In the whole of Space,
    Like that good ol' toddlin' town,
    Lunar City Seven,
    You're my idea of heaven
    Out of ten, you score eleven,
    You good ol' artificial terra-formed,
    settlement...

    The End.

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  12. Lets hope it all works! by BigBadBus · · Score: 1
    After seeing a BBC documentary last night, where NASA and ESA realised after launch that Cassini and Huygens couldn't talk properly to each other, it makes me really optimistic about the success of the mission. Makes me remember the crash-landing of the Stardust mission!

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    1. Re:Lets hope it all works! by Silburn_Luke · · Score: 1

      Yeah that struck me as a bit odd and they didn't go into a great amount of detail regarding why the fault wasn't picked up on the ground - given that the problem was described as the transmitter and receiver being tuned to different frequencies it seems like a fairly easy thing to spot prior to launch.

      Of course the documentary could have been simplifying massively, but I got a sense that there were plenty of things being left unspoken in an effort to foster diplomatic face-saving between the various project teams. It was pretty clear that the Hugyens imaging guy had a few choice words that might well have ended up on the cutting room floor.

      I thought the solution to the problem (twiddling with Cassini's velocity so that doppler shifting 'retuned' the incoming signals to a higher frequency) was a nice hack though.

      Regards
      Luke

      --
      #include witty_one_liner.h
  13. A modern rarity - the truely unknown by dtolman · · Score: 1
    I'm pretty excited about this flyby, mainly because this represents the first time where the surface of titan will be imaged up close.

    Got to love the spirit of discovery - this flyby is the first time since Voyager or Magellan where a space probe has a shot of taking pictures of a planet we've never really seen before, and don't really fully know what to expect...

  14. Re:More info by dtmos · · Score: 1

    IEEE Spectrum has a nice article on this near-debacle. The problem was that the tests performed did not consider that the received data rate, in addition to the carrier frequency, would be affected by Doppler, and the receiver would lose bit synchronization.

    The full system test, which would have detected the problem, was not performed because--wait for it--they wanted to save money.

  15. If you look just right.. by StikyPad · · Score: 1

    you can clearly see the antigravity device, just like the one on Mars. And obviously that's a power plant on the lower right.

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