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.'"

Comments

Sploosh

[Faust7]

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.

Re:Huygens

[spiny]

http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathemati cians/Huygens.html

I Wanna See Rain!

[Haydn Fenton]

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!

Re:I Wanna See Rain!

[myowntrueself]

"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."

Actually this already happens here on Earth (only with water).

There are desert areas (Sahara included IIRC) where sometimes it rains and the rain evaporates before it can hit the ground.

I believe its called 'ghost rain'

Re:I Wanna See Rain!

[NoseBag]

In Arizona, its called Virga i.e. rain that never reaches the ground.

Its actually quite neat to see in the distance. You can see the downpour falling, usually from under a nice dark thundercloud (uh, where else?), and then it kinda gets fuzzy and vague, and then it just....isn't. The "isn't" boundary also moves up and down slowly - due to air currents and such, I guess. Its quite peaceful to observe.

Re:I Wanna See Rain!

[isolationism]

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.

Hooray for NASA/ESA collaboration

[ikewillis]

For those who don't know, the Hyugens probe bound for Titan was developed by the EU's Space Agency. It will provide us with the first glimpses below Titan's cloudy surface, and was carried by NASA's Cassini probe.

It's wonderful to see such collaboration between the ESA and NASA, and I hope we continue to see such efforts in the future.

Re:Hooray for NASA/ESA collaboration

[Anonymous Coward]

While we're educating - the EU does not have a space agency. The European Space Agency is it's own (or it's member nations...), and not a part of the EU. A few countries who are not in the EU are in ESA (hell, even Canada is - though they're a little special :). I still find the collaboration wonderful though - the world would be a better place with some more of that...

Re:Hooray for NASA/ESA collaboration

[drachton]

ESA page for the Cassini-Huygens mission. They have a couple of Flash animations, some nice pictures of Titan (here) and an interesting factsheet on the mission.

Ever see 2010?

[Faust7]

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...

Image of the Huygens/Cassini separation

[ikewillis]

Here's an excellent image of the seperation of the Cassini spacecraft with the Huygens probe bound for Titan:

http://planetary.org/saturn/images_spacecraft.html

Re:Image of the Huygens/Cassini separation

[Wyatt Earp]

Excellent artist's interpretation of what the seperation might look like

To clarify...

[ethnocidal]

Cassini-Huygens is a joint mission between NASA and the European Space Agency - http://www.esa.int/. Cassini (the main vehicle) is NASA's responsibility, and the robot probe called Huygens is ESA's.

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

Re:To clarify...

[snake_dad]

Good to see some international cooperation in a venture like this.

If that aspect of this mission is news to you, you will probably be surprised to know that in many NASA missions there are several non-US instruments. An example that comes to mind is the Mossbauer Spectrometer on the instrument arm of the current Mars rovers. This experiment was built by a German university (IIRC). Another example of cooperation would be the tests that were done on Mars, sending data to Earth from the rovers, through the European Mars Express spacecraft. And it is the same with European spacecraft, many include American experiments.

And if it wasn't news to you it probably was news to someone else reading this :)

An open door.

[OgTheBarbarian]

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

Re:An open door.

[2A]

Untrue. We'll immediately launch another probe with devices for detecting interplanetary WMDs, get bored waiting for it to get conclusive results, and so send bigger ships to liberate the methan^H^H^H^H^H^Htitans...

Or maybe the TV appeals will start: "there's been life discovered on the moon, Titan. These lifeforms don't know the love and teachings of Jesus. We need you to donate money so we can build our own spaceship, so we can spread to word of Jesus to these so called 'Marklah'."

But most likely, both will happen.

Demonic discovery?

[Xentropy]

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?

NASA have picutres up of the seperation

[Bhalash]

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

It's called HUYGENS!!

[SeaDour]

"Robot Lab"? WTF?!? Give some credit where it's due!

Re:Hmmm.

[crymeph0]

Venus is the planet which was supposed to have jungles.

You make a valid point about over-speculating, but at least the speculation about Titan is based on the fact that the temperatures at Titan are in the right range for methane to be liquid, solid, and gas. So it's not just some dreamer's wild vision.

I'd say there's definitely some sort of liquid action going on though, because there aren't that many impact craters from what they have been able to tell, which indicates that the surface has been recently eroded. It could be volcanism too, I guess, but I would think we'd have detected some chemical signatures of that even without being able to see the surface that clearly. Any chemists in the audience, please feel free to prove me wrong.

Re:Great!

[Zerth]

Somewhere, there is a scraggle-toothed man saying "That thar's cheap for such a purty fella!"

opinions

[morcheeba]

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...

Not enough time on the surface

[PingXao]

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.

Re:Not enough time on the surface

[Anonymous Coward]

It will have been doing major science for over two hours by the time it lands, including taking pictures all the way down. Whatever it does on the surface is 'bonus' time. And no, if it splashes down in a lake, it will not sink. In fact, it has an instrument that will use sonar to try and determine the depth of the lake. Also, whatever it does on the surface is constrained not just by battery life, but by communications with Cassini -- which will vanish over Titan's horizon about an hour after the probe lands.

unfortunately, doppler will ruin this.

[Bram Stolk]

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

fortunately, doppler has been sidestepped.

[bmfs]

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.

Cassini images of Titan's surface

[valdean]

Wired News has some pictures of Titan's surface taken by Cassini. The article explains somewhat the new questions the images have created, and what the Huygens mission hopes to accomplish in terms of answering those questions, including this explanation for the bright/dark spots:

Do the dark areas in the radar images of Titan's surface signify the existence of lakes?

When radar waves are used to create images of surfaces, areas that reflect more radio waves turn up as bright spots, while those that reflect fewer waves appear as dark spots. Some scientists believe the large, dark patches in the Titan images could be lakes full of liquid ethane and propane, which would absorb radio waves. But if this is true, do the lakes have ripples and waves caused by the wind, or are they completely still?

http://www.wired.com/news/space/0,2697,65533,00.ht ml

Re:Black and white

[Science]

Yes, they use B&W cameras. Astronomers are interested in detail first color second. Color cameras don't have the resolution of B&W. Color images are created by taking three idential B&W images through three different color filters. When combined and processed, the three B&W images produce a color image.