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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.
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.
"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.
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.