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Lake spotted on Titan?
jahead writes "It looks like
a lake has been seen on Saturn's moon Titan by the Cassini probe. But don't get too excited yet. As mentioned by Elizabeth Turtle in the article, it could also be a dried up lake that left dark deposits."
And now, for a limited time only, I can sell you lake front property on said lake on Titan for the astonishingly low price of $20 an acre!!!
Madre de Dios! Es El Pollo Diablo! -- Captain Blondebeard
I'm not trolling, I'm curious. Surely, liquids exist in space, and surely they must pool? If it were a *water* lake I'd say that'd be something (life!?), but on a planet where there's likely methane rain, there's likely methane lakes.
libertarianswag.com
And the Space tourism boon gets another boost.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Once prices go up, the government will just seize it under eminent domain!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I knew Ricki Lake had a fat ass, but I didn't know you could see it from space.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
What they don't tell you is, Don't Drink The Water!!!!
Evolution or ID?
The announcement was later rectracted by NASA officials after it was confirmed that the "dried-up lake" was, in fact, Joan Rivers vacationing in the new Klingon botox retreat.
I dare you to light my cigar standing at that lake!
I am more interested in what Cassini finds once it gets to Europa. A possible methane lake seems inconsequential compared to the supposed "water world" of Europa. Then again, I suppose if it was in the neighborhood, it might as well check out Titan and see what's shakin, or lakin' as the case may be...
In other news, Titan went up in flames earlier this morning when a careless tourist ignored the "No Smoking" signs clearly posted in the vicinity of "Methane Lake". When will these off-worlders learn to pay attention?
But don't get too excited yet [...] it could also be a dried up lake that left dark deposits.
IANA rocket scientist but.. Would we not be excited if it turned out to be a lake -- dried up or otherwise? I mean, are dried-up lakes often found out there, relative to not-yet-dried-up ones? Just curious.
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
The feature lies in Titan's cloudiest region, which is presumably the most likely site of recent methane rainfall. (from nava.gov)
:).
nothing like a big ol lake about the size of Lake Ontario of methane sitting around. kinda rules out the thought that life is sitting in there. unless its a new breed of methane breathing fish
You Titan, me-thane
...clearly visible and 235km across that looks like a like. Previosuly a probe landed on Titan photographing lakelike features all the way down. And the only way people can be sure it is a lake is by viewing the feature from the right angle to see if it glints in the sun. 235km across! I don't know about you, but if that's the best they can do, I think they loaded up Cassini and Huygens with the wrong set of instruments.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
A few weeks ago, a lake mysteriously went missing in Russia. Back then, many people suspected that the lake had gotten fed up with the villagers throwing garbage into it, and just walked away. I guess we now know where it went :7
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
The empire is building a mega-Olympic-size Sith bath.
welcome our new Jovian methane lake-dwelling overlords. Seriously though, I wonder what (if any) implications this has for our knowedge of the other planets in the solar system...
Sirens?
Don't blame me, I voted for Durga.
I think they loaded up Cassini and Huygens with the wrong set of instruments.
The instruments on Cassini and Huygens are revealing Titan as place worthy of much further exploration. I thought the reveal of a river bed like structure on an ice moon was worth the price of admission alone. Total success in my book, if nothing more these missions define what we might want to send in subsequent probes.
well???
It's the main weapon of a space station.
Allow me to be the first to propose extreme extraterrestrial sports. Hydrocarbon skiing, anyone? Synchronized searching for life forms? I don't know, but I'm sure MTV would cover it.
"I drank WHAT?!"--Socrates
...mistaken for dalmation.
Do you love freedom??? Do you love freedom!!! DO YOU LOVE FREEDOM!!!!!!!!
...and Larry Ellison is ALREADY having a 250-foot yacht built for racing there. True to form, though, shortsighted Larry demanded the boat's engines run on propane, despite the fact that methane is plentiful, free, and technically superior.
The reason we shouldn't drain it today is because we'll have nothing tomorrow. Something every generation prior to ours has understood is that you don't eat your "seed corn."
I don't know why we'll need these oil reserves in the future, just that it will undoubtably come in useful sometime during the next 10,000 years. It's extremely shortsighted to say that our needs to drive Hummers out to exburbs on 35-acre ranchettes because the relatively affluent don't want neighbors in an urban environment is more important.
N.B., I'm not saying that we shouldn't use oil at all. Just that we act in a responsible manner instead of assuming that Jesus will be along any day now and we don't have to worry about things like this.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Sunlight breaks down methane, so to have it in Titan's atmosphere (particularly at such high levels) it has to be continually replaced. You can make methane on Titan via either life or some sort of weird chemical process. So the methane is a hint at possible life.
:)
o duct-presentations.cfm has lots of good inside information about the science results... the end of the "Titan: First Views of an Alien World" discusses where to look for life on Titan)
Titan's atmosphere is also full of a haze of complex organic molecules that continually rain down on the surface... leaving deposits of hydrocarbons on the surface hundreds of meters thick.
Now if only these complex organics could get mixed in with water. (And it has to be water, because you need the oxygen). Guess what 'rocks' on Titan are made out of
So you might have something happening in this methane lake with methane being the liquid and oxygen coming from ice... but this would be completely different from life as we know it...
My own bet is on the volcano to look for life (The volcano on Titan erupts molten water). Also there might be life in Titan's mantle (it's made of liquid water + ammonia mixture).
(This website: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/products/pr
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
So we are sending all these probes.. Mars and Titan for example.
What if one of them returned images of cities, or villages, either deserted or actively inhabited. - What do you think would happen? Would there be a giant cover up? Or maybe a giant newsflash? Would those responsible for the probe just publically "forget" that they ever sent a probe there?
Don't Tread on Me
That's pretty weak too.
How about:
"Maybe that enourmous dark crater is where all the fucking documentation in the [something] distro went!"
or:
"Looks like all the Linux geeks ejaculated in the same spot as part of a big circle-jerk of penguin love."
Sprinkle with random links to wherever you want.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Parent is a troll or an idiot, since he appears to have forgotten which planets the moons he mentions are orbiting
I am trolling
The reliance on fossil fuels does put limits on our energy expenditures. If we do succeed in producing fusion power cheaply we will have a new form of pollution; heat. Even if we move to non-polluting forms of energy production other than nuclear we will still be left with heat. In my opinion once you remove the spectre of visible pollution that we have with today's fossil plants many people will be hard convinced that there is any pollution left, after all its "green power".
While we all can agree mankind affects his global environment we cannot agree to what extent he does. Everyday something new comes up that throws a wrench into every argument made pro and con. Understanding more about how other planets work may lead to better insights here.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
What's significant about this was that it was initially hypothesized that since titan had a considerable atmosphere of methane and other hydrocarbons, that the surface of Titan was possibly covered in either a massive liquid methane ocean or a methane ice sheet. However once the Huygens probe landed, that hypothesis was disproved (the one about liquid methane on the surface).
No methane ice sheet either.... Cassini's instruments (specifically VIMS I think) have shown that the surface is mostly water ice. Titan's surface is turning out to be pretty bizarre and defying any of the earlier notions of what it would be like.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
but we're unable to find where the icon images at /. are going.
Okay, more practically, I'll wait to care about this for when they announce it as absolute, no way it is anything but. I want them to find these exotic weather systems with methane, propane, and so on, but I want them to be solid with the observations and calculations first and foremost. Anything else is just more glamorizing. I want it to finally be something you can put in a basic space science book and tell kids, yes, this is true.
Like the aluminum and titanium content of lunar soil as opposed to cheese.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Did anyone else notice the little village of resort condos just south and east of the lake on titan?
I'm guessing the skiing is phenomenal with snow made from hydrocarbons (think frozen motor oil).
Can I make reservations through expedia?
"Sic Semper Path of Least Resistance"
So, is Titan an Inter Galactic Filling Station for Vogon space ships, or does it lack something - an oxidizer maybe?
Could you fill up on Titan with methane fuel and on Saturn with oxigen?
Oh well, what the hell...
Clearly there'll be many different groups - meteorologists, geologists, vulcanologists, xenobiologists and so on fighting for every gram of space. What finally gets installed is probably more a matter of departmental politics than anything else.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Yes, but did they spot the laser beams from the sharks living on it?
Huygens> Affirmative, parachute deployed.
Cassini> Can you see anything down there yet?
Huygens> Not really, it's pretty dark.
Cassini> Turn on your flashlight.
Huygens> Alright, taking it out... aw crap, I dropped it, not gettin that one back, I'm still at 10,000 meters.
Cassini> Oh that sucks, what about your water proof matches? Says here in the manual that we should use them in case of emergency.
Huygens> Well, it's better than sitting here in the dark... Taking them out, opening the box, I'll use two jus... *carrier terminated*
Cassini> Huygens? Huygens respond. Come on back now. Uh, Houston.. we have a problem.
IANALOOA
that ain't no lake, it's the 18th hole!
... lake spotting
Sorry, sorry everyone, oh jesus look what I've gone and done.
Long story short I'm an engineer at NASA who worked on Cassini...and during one of our final routine checks prior to launch I accidentally sneezed all over it when while climbing a ladder. Unfortunately I had a particularily bad case of flu on the day...and unbeknown to me and my colleagues a rather nasty helping of mucus found its way onto Cassini's camera lense.
So what your seeing here is sadly not a lake, or otherwise liquidy extraterrestial phenomenon...but a minescule amount of frozen saliva.
"Looks like all the Linux geeks ejaculated in the same spot as part of a big circle-jerk of penguin love."
I Like the second one.
Does anyone have pictures? Always new Linux weenies were loosers.
- Moomin
Hey, Turtles know all about dried up lakes.
They never would have spotted the lake if not for the clearly marked "No Fishing" sign...
[insert Uranus joke here] :P
>When this vapourised mass evaporates into space in a vacuum, where does it go? Nowhere, so gravity drags it back, applying its heat back to the mass. Therefore there is no overall temperature change.
The phase change from solid/liquid to gas is endothermic, so the overall temperature will cool. It's why you sweat, the evaporation of water cools you.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
...how would it behave? Is liquid methane more viscous than water or less? What kind of splash/waves would you get compared to a regular water lake if, for example, you threw a rock into a liquid methane lake? Does Titan have tides, and if so, would they be strong enough to create the lake shore lapping effect we see with lakes here? Titan's gravity is a lot lower than Earth's, of course, so that would affect the methane's behavior, too... what would the differences be between the behavior of a methane lake on Titan and one here on Earth, assuming that, say, a lab were to create the proper conditions to allow a methane lake to exist stably on Earth?
The point is they *can* tell if it's a lake. If the sun-glinting method works, sure it might seem a bit goofy, but it frees up mass to use with other instruments.
Titan is very hazy. Thus, there would probably not be a clear-cut "glint" even if there was a body of liquid. Cassini has to use a specially-designed filter to even see the surface. Surface features are almost entirely invisable without the filter.
Table-ized A.I.
Bring on the slugs!
If sweat cools by eliminating heat with excreting water, why have we evolved the capability to sweat at all? Surely it would be simpler to just urinate, as well as not give any signs to predators though the odor later caused by bacteria.
You can be in a closed room, sweat, and cool, because in evaporating, you lose 580cal/gm water though latent heat of vaporization, while the specific heat of water is a paltry 1cal/gm-C by comparison. The heat remains, "trapped" in the evaporated sweat.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.