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Cassini's Robot Lab Successfully Separates
toomanyairmiles writes "The BBC has an article indicating NASA's Cassini probe has successfully launched its robot lab on its three-week journey into the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan. 'Such is the chemistry and temperature (-180C) on Titan that scientists suspect it may harbour lakes, even great seas, of methane or ethane.' Seemingly we have very little idea of what we'll find there: 'Even Cassini's remarkable instruments have struggled to get at the facts. Scientists can see dark and bright regions on the surface, but quite what they represent no one is really sure.'"
What .. they are still using B&W television over there.
Maybe on another world people like this don't have to go on eBay to get laid!
Anyone know why they named it Huygens? Is there a significance to that?
even great seas, of methane so now the joke in NASA will be 'who ripped one on titan'
I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. - Catcher in the Rye
there is every possibility that Huygens will make a splashdown
And, if the BBC's pic is correct, it will look almost exactly like an upended Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.
The coolest voice ever.
I can remember the BBC program about Titan, or some TV show about it anyway. It was pretty fascinating stuff really, especially how rain on Titan will appear. Because the atmosphere is more methane/ethane, when the rain falls, it will be like normal rain at first because higher up in the air it will be colder and the methane/ethane will be liquid, but as it gets closer to the surface, it will turn into a gas as it warms up, so the rain will turn from liquid into a gas before it reaches the surface, and will then rise upwards. Hellish cool if you ask me. Especially if its green, I think it was on the TV show, although clearly thats just a mock up. And seas of methane and ethane will also be cool, if theyre green.. probably wont be, but hey.
Bring on the rain!
It's wonderful to see such collaboration between the ESA and NASA, and I hope we continue to see such efforts in the future.
Scientists can see dark and bright regions on the surface, but quite what they represent no one is really sure.
My money's on the dark regions being a plague of multiplying monoliths. Cover your eyes...
The coolest voice ever.
http://planetary.org/saturn/images_spacecraft.html
Good to see some international cooperation in a venture like this. After the stunning shots of Titan and Saturn returned by Cassini's sensors, we can only hope that the remote probe fares better than Beagle 2 :)
ESA article with more information
Now just imagine, however inhospitable the conditions sound to us, if that probe came back with images of a civilization or even an outpost (inhabited or abandoned/destroyed). That one piece of news would turn the whole world on its edge. Sometimes great discoveries come, when you're not really looking for them. 'If it is just us, it seems like an awful waste of space.' - Contact
Slashdot headline sucessfully mispelled.
Notice they time these things on low news days. It's not just a freak cooincidence. There's lots of money at stake here and NASA and the ESA are reluctant to use regular press days for these types of things.
That "robot lab" is called Huygens, but I guess that's too difficult for /. submitters/editors to spell.
Not to mention the NASA/EU staff that are employed and draw a salary from their work on this and related projects. Not all money sent to research/exploration projects is wasted (a common misconception). The money pays real people, real wages. They pay transportation costs, utility costs, fuel costs, etc... all filtering back into the community. The actual cost of the rocket/probe itself pales in comparison to the money folded back into the economy. Too many folks are too short-sighted to see this.
Dude, get a sense of priorities, the amount of cash spent on space is so tiny, probably less than what usa spends on toilet paper ok.
So get a damn clue you 1920s dim wit clueless jock drunk prick.
450billion on military
100s billions in corproate welfare
100s of billions in farm subsidies
100s of billions wasted in interest payments on even more horrid debt.
The only reason why people are poor is that most people gets funneled into PROPERTY and SHARES, instead of REAL work. If this pyramid game of shares/property wasnt there and the prices were fair, then there would be billions more being spent on real investments, not another "throw millions at this 15% return fund"
AIDS was man made so go talk to your local govt official.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
lol, I've never red so much bullsh.. at once. Actually it's not even worth to be commented (Yeah, why I'm doing it then?)
My Blog: "sum it up - News, emotions and science"
... scientists suspect it may harbour lakes, even great seas, of methane or ethane.
On which planet beyond the Earth was it that scientists expected to find steamy tropical jungles not all that long ago?
Speculation may be fun, but it's not exactly a guaranteed career-maker if you get it wrong.
I hope this is more a case of an overly-imaginative journalist taking something out of context than the true utterances of real, bona fide scientists.
"...solving the nations' problems like unemployment." [spelling of nations' corrected to reflect international effort]
like say.. having a big program that employs thousands of people from engineers to shop techs to cafeteria workers?
modded you off-topic for the stupid fucking i-pod advertisement. seriously, go get a job.
every chance i get i'll be modding your posts -1 until you get rid of the sig.
we got deathstar.
Doesn't that assume that slashdot readers have sex?
I find the random insertion by /. of a large Doom 3 ad (consisting of a closeup of a demonic figure) right after the text of this article an amusing irony. Just what DO we expect to find down there?
This sort of process is fairly normal in places like Arizona or the far western Sahara, for example. I was pretty excited about seeing it the first time I went to Arizona, only to find out that there isn't much to see except a slightly overcast cover in the sky.
you insensituve clod.
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm/
"Robot Lab"? WTF?!? Give some credit where it's due!
there are no photographs there, only imaginative artist renderings of what it "might" look like.
Even Cassini's remarkable instruments have struggled to get at the facts.
From what I heard, the instruments were just giving their opinions, ruminations, and vague rumors. One even broke into song, which, from a scientific viewpoint, yielded very little hard data...
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
So by not spending money on scientific endeavors you think the US will become more relevant to the world and not fall behind. What the hell are you smoking and can I have some of it. Actually wait a minute: the US/EU has high rates of unemployment and disease???? Well that's news to me. And even if they did 1 billion would have done absolutely jack shit as politicians would have simply spent it on various pet projects. Damn liberals who think that the only way to solve problems is to spend tax money on them, without thinking of any of the consequences. You know why Africa is a shit hole: because in the last 100 years it's population went up seven fold. And you know why it did that: because liberal humanitarians decided that introducing modern medicine to lower child mortality is a great idea without even looking at the potential conflicts it would cause with the social and economic infrastructure. Disease is what holds populations in check when people arte too immature to do it themselves.
cant want to get some pictures.. what an exciting time to be around
I know there must be a zillion reasons why they designed the Huygens probe mission the way they did, but to me it seems like a pity that it's only got enough battery life to operate for 30 minutes on the surface after it lands, assuming it doesn't sink in a hydrocarbon lake. It took 7 years to get there for only 30 minutes worth of surface obserations? The results it sends back from only 30 minutes worth of surface exploration will surely raise more questions than they answer, and since this is the last of the big-ticket planetary probes we're likely to see for decades to come it just doens't seem like a long enough window to operate. Weight probably had a lot to do with the decisions made. Batteries are heavy. That plus the uncertainty as to whether it will land on solid ground at all most likely drove the 30-minute mission requirement, but it still seems too short. I must be getting spoiled by the Mars rovers.
go to work my MONKies of doom...
I hope the probe does well because I have recently been informed that Titan artwork I submitted for an art contest has been selected to be part of the planned exibit after the probe's mission is done. My work is far more likely to have its day in the sun if the probe is successful than if it fails.
holy fuck, I've never wished cancer upon anyone as strongly as I am right now
Like an WPA for engineers? Give me a break!
The cassini/huygens mission launched at 1997.m l
However, in 2000 it became apparent that the
Italians who were doing cassini-huygens comms,
forgot to account for the doppler effect.
This debacle would cut the comms time to only
10% of planned communication time. NASA and ESA
seem to remain silent about this foul up since
then. Read more about it at
http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/4/4137/1.ht
Bram Stolk http://stolk.org/tlctc/
Remain silent? There was a BBC Horizon documentary on this very subject broadcast earlier this year. You can read more about the problem and the solution here:
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature /oct04/1004titan.html
And here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon /saturn_prog_summary.shtml
Problem: Italian Company (Alenia Spazio) responsible for comms corrected for doppler shift on the carrier signal, but not on the data rate. Alenia Spazio's insistence on confidentiality may have played a role in this oversight. NASA reviewers were never given the specs of the receiver. As JPL's [Robert] Mitchell explained, "Alenia Spazio considered JPL to be a competitor and treated the radio design as proprietary data."
Solution: Altered the trajectory of Cassini / Huygens so that Huygens is moving parallel to Cassini during descent, sidestepping the doppler shift issue.
http://www.wired.com/news/space/0,2697,65533,00.ht ml
If you cancelled the space program, your going to be putting a hell of a lot of people in the unemployment line. Have you actually considered where the money for the space programme goes when it is spent, or do you believe that NASA put the billion of dollars in notes on the probe and blasts it off into space?
Wait, so let me get this straight...you're suggesting that everyone should just kill themselves, to undo the "damage" caused by medicine?
No that was an example, you can't change history however you can learn from it. I simply said that instead of throwing money at random "humanitarian" endeavors you instead see what your actions could lead to, and spend that money so that it provides the most benefit.
For example, curing disease is all nice however if the country lacks the social infrastructure to support those changes then maybe you should work on that infrastructure instead of just dumping medicine on them.