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Titan's Alien Thunder
An anonymous reader writes "What is not being reported much about the fascinating Huygens descent to the surface of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is its remarkable microphone. In the silence of space, the probe offers a platform for listening to alien thunder while watching the lightning strike on this alien world--the only moon with an atmosphere thicker than our terrestrial one. The probe detaches from Cassini on Christmas for its atmospheric entry on 14 January 2005. The landing target on Titan borders a bright-dark region thought to be an oil-rich shoreline. Huygens can float for a few hours while still broadcasting if it lands in a lake of oil."
Titan may offer the first chance for a terrifying symphony of alien thunder.
Alien thunder?.........hrmmmmm......new, name......for a band? Yeah, that's it.
On a more serious note, here is the link to the Cassini-Huygens main page complete with a tital flyby schedule, a flyby mission description, photo essay including some amazing images of the rings of Saturn, Titan and more.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Is NASA going to let a contract to Hallibuton to develop the resource?
"lake of oil"...WMD's... We all know the drill.
no one can hear you scream
That being said I wonder if the accelerometers are installed in the right direction?
Got Code?
...that crop up around here from time to time after setbacks, you HAVE to be amazed by what they have accomplished on an ever-shrinking budget.
Kudos, NASA! Some of us are still impressed!
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
The Titans might not be too happy about us making gasoline out of their ancestors.
12:50 - press return.
No sig here...
"What is not being reported much..."
That's because it hasn't happened yet. I look forward to downloading the audio once Huygens lands, and if there happens to be a thunderstorm at the time. But until then, I'm not sure what the point of this story is.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I would like to propose someone.. for president there. Does it matter if he's already president somewhere else?
...since they had to compensate for a telecommunications problem. Read more here.
libertarianswag.com
...that's all.
Ni.
Interesting link for the various Nasa staff personal sites.
the only moon with an atmosphere thicker than our terrestrial one.
Does a thicker atmosphere necessarely mean a good thing? By good I mean in terms of maybe the life (if any) on the moon/planet or what ressources we may find or conditions of the air?
... with an atmosphere thicker than our moon's that we know of. At the rate science is going... There was a great Arthur. C. Clarke book about hydrogen mining on Titan; I can't remember the title at the moment, but it's definitely worth a read.
Hosted on a computer, it would be much safer to see it in "person"! Plus, there would be no concievable danger.
With the cyberthalamus, the singularity will happen.
Are all the WMD and "Invade!" and "Haliburton!" jokes even funny any more? They're about as predictable as the Soviet Russia troll, but not nearly as funny.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Ring of fire is a term women use to describe a type of pain during child birth....
By your logic, oil means there is a group of arabs there waiting to fill your tank.
Seriously, oil can form from the complex hydrocarbons present, not just dinosaurs. While controversial, it is though that if this is correct, earth's oil reserves might be larger (and deeper) than previously thought, having come from cosmic sources.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Calling it alien thunder is quite a geocentric perspective. The thunder there is native, Huygens is alien.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Hydrocarbon-rich atmospheres bring the possibility of fuel-breathing jet engines. With a tank of oxygen or other oxidizer, a craft could scoop the fuel from the "air" and fly or run a powerplant.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
At last, a lake of oil that Cap'n Hazelwood and the Exxon Valdez can enjoy a good bit of drunken sailing in without worrying about the resulting oil spills causing a problem.
Because you posted AC.
... oil lands on you!
A lake of oil? Sounds like Capt. Hazelwood may have beat us there...
Do you have ESP?
This might be as interesting as listening to seti packets. hmm.. maybe a chance for Alien Thunder @ home calculations.
telax - Just another vim and c hacker.
I wonder if the instruments are going to measure the effects of the sonic boom(s) on entry into Titan's atmosphere too...
This concept (Like so many) seems to attack everything I've been told since grade-school. Can you cite a source site (sic), or print article?
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
Both of you should stop using petroleum products.
It's rather darn good evidence that oil doesn't come from dead dinosaurs...
If by "controversial" you mean:
Oil Industry: Nuh uh! We are not running out oil. Keep driving that SUV you fool!
Oil Industry: Also, don't even think about transitioning to renewable sources. Don't make me buy a law. I will do it!
Only in a Slashdot fantasy can a Slackware install turn into several hours of sex . . . . .
Hey, this is slashdot, you definately need a web sight!
OK, anyways, here you go.
Really? I use it to describe the pain of passing last night's habanero chili...
Try "Power from the Earth" by Thomas Gold for an interesting read. He basically says oil is primordial material contaminated by biological products. He makes some interesting points.
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
This is definitely a simplistic question and has probably been answered somewhere else in the ether of the web but here goes:
If the probe will be able to float for a few hours IF it lands in a body of some liquid, why did they not include flotation devices like they used to have on the old Apollo capsules? Was it a weight thing (i.e. too much weight), design limitations (i.e. not enough room) a combination thereof or other reasons?
It would seem to me that if the device can float without these devices for several hours then including these devices could extend the floating ability of the probe for days/weeks/months/whatever. This would have substantially increased the time to gather information.
Or are there devices already on the probe and this is the best they could do under the circumstances?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
This is going to be a fascinating event - however I do have some questions.. The total mission cost is around $4 billion - is this good value for money? For example look at New Horizons, a Jupier/Pluto/KBO mission with a total projected cost of $600 million. I also wonder, given the scale of the mission, if a RTG should have been put on board Huygens so that it could stay longer and observe the Titan environment over a longer time? (Yes I know it could only relay data when Cassini passes by, but that could still be useful..) Listening to thunderstorms is all well and good, and adding a mic is worth doing because its a cheap thing to do in such a system, but what about a lander that spends more time there looking at the chemistry of Titan?
I think that the smaller, cheaper missions return much better scientific return for the money. For instance, most of the function of the proposed $10 billion JIMO mission could be done by a cheaper Europa-only orbiter that would cost less than $1 billion. (See: http://www.spacedaily.com/news/hubble-04p.html ) Also take a look at the SMART-1 ESA mission - less than $100 million for a complete mission featuring many new technologies.
For example the camera on the $4 billion Cassini mission is only 1 megapixel - if we had a larger number of smaller, cheaper missions, would we be there now with a much better imaging system. Cassini had a much delayed launch, so the design was outdated by the time of its launch in 1997. The same mission launched on a later window could have used ion propulsion (SEP/RTG combo) saving weight (1/2 the 4 tons Cassini weight is fuel)
The same thing could happen with JIMO - if NASA spend $10 billion on that, they could forego many other missions, such as a New Horizons II mission, which would give us a chance to look at Uranus (not always a good word to say on Slashdot) with modern instruments, as well as Jupiter & some more KBO's..
Also think about Hubble - is it worth spending $2 billion on a robot to repair the aging telescope, when the same money could buy better new space telescopes.. (see link above)
I dont want to belittle the work of the scientist working on Cassini - it will be a fascinating mission, I just wonder if we could get more return by rejigging the beurocracy.. The X-Prize, New Horizons and SMART-1 prove that more smaller & competitive missions return much more bang-per-buck..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
So, let me see this in a new light... The people from Kurdistan are Kurds, there for aren't the people from Titan, Tits?
Liberate the Tits! Let them breathe freely, all of them!
From Technifab Liquid Natural Gas (Liquid Methane) is made by cooling natural gas to a temperature of minus 260 degrees F.
:|
Big potential for some serious CPU overclocking!!!
But unfortunately for you, the MOON around URANUS is TRITON, not Titan.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
As the Cassini-Huygens website clearly explains, the Huygens probe will be released from Cassini on Dec 25. It will enter Titan's atmosphere on January 14, but it will have already been released three weeks prior.
A minor error, I guess, but I keep seeing it made.
"Huygens can float for a few hours while still broadcasting if it lands in a lake of oil."
It may float that long, but the batteries are running out soon after landing.
And because Huygens is scheduled to be dead shortly after landing/crashing, the communication session with Cassini is limited to that time span - Cassini doesn't listen much longer and Huygens has simply no programming for a longer mission time. So, even if Huygens manages to survive longer than expected, it wouldn't provide much more data nor would Cassini pick it up.
It didn't find the link again, but that's what i remembered reading somewhere on www.esa.int...
Look, this thing is totally safe! Built it myself, you know. You just press that button like this and then turn that lev
I know some other countries celebrate on different dates, but in the US, Christmas is December 25th. So the summary is correct:
The probe detaches from Cassini on Christmas (25 December 2004) for its atmospheric entry on 14 January 2005.
http://pythonisito.blogspot.com/
And a good thing, too, cause the way mu SUV goes through a tank of gas we were going to need to make a lot more dead dinosaurs to keep me on the road ;-)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
There will be a Titan flyby on Tuesday Oct, 26. Huygens will be released, and the first good images of Titan will start coming in Tuesday evening. Nasa will have special coverage. You can join #cassini on irc.freenode.net and join in the discussion. Tommorrow promises to be great fun. We invite everyone to join in on irc and party like its 1999.
Are there recordings available anywhere? Or have they not beenr received yet? None of the linked pages had any that I could find.
Synthetic Oil
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
In fact, there is an Asimov short story in which a character who has spent a long time working on Titan (IIRC) makes a mistake about which gas is flammable/explosive.
Network Services can't post to Slashdot
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
you forgot beowulf clusters of natalie portman covered in hot grits.
I remember watching a television programme about 10 years ago in the UK about an Open University academic who was designing a penetrator for I think the Huygens probe. I remember that it was a probe to determine if they hit liquid or semi-liquid ground on the surface. The person in question was interviewed as hoping that it would get on the probe etc, be launched ok etc.
Sure enough, 10 odd-years later, that probe is now on the bottom [see ref ACC-E] of Huygens and may well be the first part of the spacecraft to touch the surface of Titan later this year.
I can't imagine the dedication involved in working on something that looks simple [but I am sure is not] and then waiting seven or more years to see if it ever works.
The lead on the team is a Professor John Zarnecki - I wonder if he remembers being interviewed [if it was him] by the BBC 10 years ago ?.
They formed after Wyld Stallions broke up.
-------- In Soviet Russia, "Soviet Russia" sigs hate Slashdot.
Is it that hard to spell "come on"? It's bad enough the illiterate rednecks conflate it into one word that doesn't even sound the same, but you have to add an APOSTROPHE in there as well? Urh, definately rediculus! NOW do you get it?
What's even less reported is that this is actually recon for a pre-emptive invasion by the United States (and Poland), in the event this turns out to be true.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Thanks for playinjg.
-- ac at work
There is absolutely no doubt that most, if not all, of our known petroleum reserves come from organic sources. Petroleum geology is a mature science - these people know what they are talking about.
As an example, I don't know of any petroleum deposits not found in or very near sediments and sedimentary geology. There was one famous case of people drilling deep into granite looking for signs of petroleum. They claimed they found traces, but it was in such small quantities that it could easily have been contamination from drilling.
Until a petroleum deposit is found that could not have originated from organic sources, this theory should be placed in the "highly speculative" category.
Reminds me of a bit where Duncan, living on Titan, connects to a random microphone out on the surface and hears a strange sound. (Which he files on his PDA minisec and then forgets what he filed it under.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Professor: Now, Fry, scientists renamed Uranus in 2256 to put an end to that silly joke.
:)
It's now called "Urectum".
->Note: Quoted from memory, not accurate, deal.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
I took a look at some of the artist impressions of Titan and the probe coming down.
o rk/index.cfm
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/artw
At first I wondered if daylight would be that bright on Titan. That made me study the way light is depicted.
If you study the light source in several of the artistic renderings, the light striking Saturn in the background has nothing to do with the light on the surface of Titan. One image (Probe over Titan) shows Saturn getting light from a direction low on Titan's horizon, and yet there seems to be a bright halo around a dark cloud overhead, as if the sun were behind it.
I like the fantasy aspect of this, but I'm afraid we are going to be in for a big let-down when the real images arrive. I'd say that part of the interest in Titan is not science, but pure wonder lust.
Flyby, yes; Huygens, no, not until December
From the official mission fact-sheet: "On December 25, 2004, Cassini will release the European-built Huygens probe toward Titan. On January 14, 2005, the 2.7-meter-diameter (8.9-foot) Huygens will enter Titan's atmosphere, deploy its parachutes and begin its scientific observations during a descent of up to two and a half hours through that moon's dense atmosphere." (see also here and here)
If you're really "on the outreach team" it sounds like you need a serious clue.
SMQ 90AE4B2BC4F6BEAF7340F0B40BA2DEF7340F6BC2D0392
Cassini passes within 800 miles of Titan about 5:40 PM EST tommorrow. Some imaging earlier in the mission saw some stuff below the haze. Could be spectacular.
so, we get to hear aliens farting? maybe laughing at our puny ships?
President Bush has stated in a startling announcement that Titan is now part of the axis of evil.
Haliburton has mobilized to "liberate" the people of Titan.
And the microphone records...
"Bloody tourists! Can't we get any peace!"
What good is a microphone.
As *everyone* knows
In space, no one can hear you scream!
Since they never do anything like that on their own...
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Pain in the arse, yes. But not a crackpot. He's had a number of important discoveries which were widely scorned until later proven correct by other parties. He's been wrong a few times, too... but not often.
landing target on Titan borders a bright-dark region thought to be an oil-rich shoreline.
In my opinion, they should try to land in the oil lake if given a choice (probe can float). That would probably be more interesting than rocks.
Another thing, I think they should have sent two small Titan probes instead of one bigger one. The chances of failure are fairly high. They already barely caught one mistake with this probe, and Galileo's jupiter penetrator probe was close to flopping also.
Table-ized A.I.
Shouldn't the word used to designate things from Titan be "Titian" ?
In other words, NASA's budget has been 'increasing' by about 2.4% per year since 1999. I'm guessing that that's below inflation ( according to NASA's inflation calculator, just slightly so).
It also doesn't take into account that Bush has now added a massive project onto NASA's plate (Mars mission) without (AFAICT) providing adequate extra funding.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Shouldn't the word used to designate things from Titan be "Titian" ?
Not unless the Bug-Eyed Monsters also happen to be Italian Renaissance painters.
> It's rather darn good evidence that oil doesn't come from dead dinosaurs...
Not at all. The oil they expect to find on Titan isn't crude oil, it's hypercooled low hydrocarbons like methane, which can easily form without biology involved. The stuff they pump out of Earth, on the other hand, comes from biological matter.
Virg
Fry: Hey, as long as you don't make me smell Uranus. (laughs)
Leela: I don't get it.
Professor: I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all.
Fry: Oh. What's it called now?
Professor: Urectum. Here, let me locate it for you.
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
Sunova... how the hell did I misread that, when I went as far as to quote it? Man. Too bad I can't cancel embarrasing posts like on Usenet. :/
What's more, they will be recorded by a microphone on the probe and relayed back so that everyone on Earth can hear the sounds of Titan. Although the Russians took a microphone to Venus in the 1970s, few scientific results came out of that endeavour. A similar microphone for Mars was destroyed when NASA's Mars Polar Lander crashed a few years ago.
:-)
How convienient that so many NASA probes to Mars worked out, when the only one with a microphone failed, eh?
And although I cannot find the final answer on if it had it or not the Beagle 2 was possibly going to have a microscope as well.
Hopefully the Titanites don't mind people listening in.
Just trying to ferment ideas.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Mr. President, we've received intelligence reports indicating that Titan is harboring terrorists and stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.
Come on guys, where can I get the torrent of this "alien thunder" sound? :)
All Hail Discordia. Hail Eris. Fnord.
OIL ?! .. they got weapons of mass destructions! Quickly send anglo-american troops to invade Titan, and replace one corrupt government with another
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
I hate Liberals and Conservatives.
If you are a Liberal or a Conservative, then HAVE A NICE DAY!
Courage.