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Cassini's Robot Lab Successfully Separates

Posted by timothy on from the amicable-divorce dept.

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.'"

6 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. Huygens by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Anyone know why they named it Huygens? Is there a significance to that?

  2. I Wanna See Rain! by Haydn+Fenton · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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!

    1. Re:I Wanna See Rain! by isolationism · · Score: 3, Interesting
      As I understand it, the ethane/methane "rain" will also be the size of golf balls because of the low gravity. This is only, I confess, according to Stephen Baxter's Titan which I just finished reading.

      Anyone looking for a good, very hard sci-fi read on the subject of Titan, the book is a great one. It has the added bonus of picking up more or less exactly right now, timeline-wise. It also has some rather frighteningly accurate forecasts with relation to the ... ah, U.S. political sentiment of the time. It was published in 1997.

  3. NASA have picutres up of the seperation by Bhalash · · Score: 4, Interesting

    http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm/

  4. Re:Black and white by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    What .. they are still using B&W television over there.

    When there's only one wavelength that gets through the haze and back... yeah.

  5. unfortunately, doppler will ruin this. by Bram+Stolk · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The cassini/huygens mission launched at 1997.
    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.htm l

    --
    Bram Stolk http://stolk.org/tlctc/