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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.
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Is NASA going to let a contract to Hallibuton to develop the resource?
"lake of oil"...WMD's... We all know the drill.
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.
...since they had to compensate for a telecommunications problem. Read more here.
libertarianswag.com
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.
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.
The thing that's exciting scientists about Titan is that it's atmosphere is extremely similar to what they believe primordial Earth's atmosphere was like. It's hoped that we may learn something about the origins of life on Earth. The thick atmosphere is a good thing because it means very few elements/gases/etc have burned off or escaped, giving us the chance to study what is the closest thing to "early Earth" as we're ever going to find.
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
I'm still keeping my hopes up.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
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!"
"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
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.
Well, yes, it does. The reason why finding methane on Mars would be more exciting than methane on Titan is that on Mars, atmospheric methane is not expected to be stable, as it reacts with hydroxyl ions in the presence of sunlight to produce carbon dioxide and water (it should be noted that if the data concerning methane on Mars is right, the concentration is around 10-15 ppb, so don't expect a greenhouse effect and rain clouds any time soon). The methane on Mars would have disappeared within a few hundred years were it not replenished somehow- and the question then, is "How is methane on Mars replenished?"
The two possibilities (and both could be correct) are outgassing from geologic processes or production by methane-producing organisms. Either possibility is actually pretty exciting, as Mars as we know it now is geologically dead- it has the largest volcano in the Solar System, but no evidence of active or recent vulcanism, but of course the possibility that colonies of methanogens similar to terrestrial Archaea are producing methane on Mars would be a much more momentous discovery.
The methane and ethane on Titan, OTOH, has been there for billions of years and is almost certainly from nonliving processes, just as the methane in the atmospheres of the gas giant planets has nothing to do with organisms. It is interesting, still, though, because methane and ethane, gases on earth, may exist as liquid on Titan. A moon larger than Pluto and Mercury with seas of simple organic compounds (and possibly a "snow" of various hydrocarbon and nitrile compounds). A atmosphere denser than earth's composed of 94% nitrogen. Possibly large quanitities of water ice. All definitely reasons to go explore.
Unfortunately, it is extremely unlikely that life has developed on Titan, simply because it is far too cold (about 94K). The basically opaque atmosphere and distance from the sun make really interesting chemistry very difficult, in particular, keeping any water locked up as ice rather than making it available as liquid or vapor. There may be some interesting stuff going on in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, though, as UV breaks down methane and nitrogen gas to produce a variety of polyacetylene and polynitrile compounds which fall as a waxy precipitate (the aforementioned "snow").
The geology of Titan is essentially still a question mark, owing again to the orange-brown veil. If anything like the deep-sea vents of earth exist on Titan, they could provide the rest of the requirements for life- they'd inject heat into the ecosystem, possibly freeing up water vapor and oxygen from the ice, and could provide elements like phosphorus and sulfur (giving the sought-after CHONPS). Also, Saturn produces tremendous tidal forces on Titan. While on the one hand, the development of life on earth was helped substantially by the presence of intertidal areas (which still feature incredible diversity), the tides on Titan may so strong as to quickly erode continental features. There are a lot of mysteries that will be solved after Cassini-Huygens, and no doubt a stack of new ones will be found.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."