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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.
...since they had to compensate for a telecommunications problem. Read more here.
libertarianswag.com
you HAVE to be amazed by what they have accomplished on an ever-shrinking budget.
Actually, NASA's bugett has basically been constant, receiving small increases to adjust for inflation.
1999 - ~$13.6B
2000 - ~$14B
2001 - ~$14.5B
2002 - ~$14.5B
2003 - ~$15B
I've just signed legislation that'll outlaw Russia forever. We'll begin bombing in five minutes.
You mean Imperial Earth, probably.
It's all just hydrocarbons, it's just that on earth a lot of the solid carbon is tied up in living creatures so our hydrocarbons come from decomposition of their dead bodies. The clouds of ethanol in outer space don't make me assume that there are deep-space breweries, for example.
On Titan, it's cold enough that the lighter hydrocarbons like methane are liquid, so the sea of 'oil' is probably just short chain alkanes like methane.
Well considering there is hardly any oxygen this shouldn't be a problem.
Hey, this is slashdot, you definately need a web sight!
OK, anyways, here you go.
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...
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.
"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
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.
The Mars rovers only have 1-megapixel cameras too, but those pictures look pretty darned good. It's all about the quality of the design and the parts that go into it, mostly, the lens and the size of the imager chip. Read more at msnbc.
Chip H.
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.
They already tried something similar to your approach. Remember the "Faster, Better, Cheaper" missions that NASA tried a few years ago? They became famous for failing spectacularly.
Interplanetary travel is pretty difficult, so it ends up being rather expensive to build a spacecraft that can cope with the trillion little things that could go wrong.
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 ?.
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.
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.
They are not comaring the atmosphere of our moon with Titan's. They are comparing Earth's atmosphere with Titan's atmosphere.