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Saturn Moon Continues to Delight and Baffle
vic_1066 writes to tell us that BBC News is reporting on the many interesting discoveries made by the Cassini probe. The Saturn moon, Enceladus, apparently continues to provide confusion and excitement for scientists the world over. The Cassini probe has been making waves ever since its arrival to the Saturn system.
"The Cassini probe has been making waves ever since it's arrival to the Saturn system."
What, now there's water on Saturn, too!
(I know, I know, it's not a rock like Mars is... gimme a little rope here for the joke, k?)
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
That's no moon! It's a space station! And many Bothans died to bring us that information.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
I knew I was delighted when I read the name of the moon... until I realized it's not "Enchiladas"... :(
As best I know, they keep finding new moons in the Saturn and Jupiter systems. Is it possible that there are more to be found?
http://www.enterprisemission.com/moon1.htm/
As usual, get the information straight from NASA
Press Release, Pictures
Throw the bums out!
..then we can have a hope of a mission there. Without upsetting the monoliths!
..don't panic
"In Greek mythology Enceladus was a Titan who was defeated in battle and buried under Mount Etna by Athena."
I don't get it.
We spend all this money to survey the popular moons around Saturn, and all of the suddenly a moon that no one heard of is grabbing headlines. So is Tom Cruise making out with Katie Holmes behind Enceladus?
These are the things that make this universe so incredible! Nature may be governed by general laws, but she will never allow a dull moment
For such a tiny moon (its only 500km across), this one packs plenty of surprises. This oddity has: a localized hotspot at its southern pole, a largely water vapor atmostphere with some interesting trace compounds, and most intriguingly, a spot on the very short list of places possibly harboring life.
Absolutely intriguing - congrats to the Cassini team for their achievements.
So at the equator it's several hundred degrees below zero -- cold enough to freeze your balls off in 2.3 seconds. At the south polar region, it's a bit less... cold enough to freeze your balls off in 2.15 seconds. When do we send the manned mission?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
if the source of the heat turned out to be a natural nuclear reactor, like Oklo. I doubt that's a possibility, since I would think it'd put off a lot more heat if it were.
stuff
Someone contact the predators... we may have a problem. On second thought, give Arnold a ring too.
I wonder.
Platinum would be interesting too given it's catalyst power. Given enough energy though, I think it's pretty easy to get here.
..don't panic
Enceladus, apparently continues to provide confusion and excitement for scientists the world over.
Why? Is Enceladus a naked girl?
Har har har.
~jeff
C'mon, it's really simple:
::= "it is" | "it has"
it's
for ALL OTHER USES, there is no apostrophe in 'its'
Surely this simple rule isn't beyond the tech-heads here? For those of us that care about English this is as jarring a syntax error as anything that would barf a compiler. So do our parsers a favour and LEARN this simple rule.
Clearly they mean gravity waves, which is nothing special because it's been doing that since long before it was even put together. The people of millions of years ago--people all over the world and possibly some comets--would be walking around thinking to themselves in perfect English, "That tugging? It's that pre-Cassini chunk of ore, all right! It'll really make waves someday when it arrives in the Saturn system."
Told!
by Calcman of all people.
Probably, but only after he waffled a bit first.
My moon also continues to Delight and Baffle!
Wanna see?
Its about to crash into England!
If you want to read some kooky stuff about all of this, check out EnterpriseMission.com that guy has tons of interesting stuff about the moons. Sure, there are some segments that are to far out there, but it makes for an interesting read. He predicted half of this stuff and was a big wig at NASA for a while.
This is an interesting theory.
A less exotic explanation may be some sort of chemical reaction. An asteroid or somesuch reacting with the water.
Remember folks, slashdot doesn't have a -1 "disagree" moderation!
Ah, I love astronomy articles. This one does not disappoint. Gotta say, though, "tiger stripes" just doesn't seem to describe the picture. Really, they look more like vericose veins. Guess that's less appealing, isn't it?
Heh, that last picture looks like it could be a poster for Deep Impact 2: This Time It's A Moon!
I quote others only in order the better to express myself. -- Michel de Montaigne
Defeated in battle and buried under a mountain. Talk about a serious bitch-fight! That'd definately make Enceladus hot under her collar...
“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with nuclear bombs. We have a protractor.” — Neal Stepnenso
An off the cuff guess? About that warm spot and tiger stripe at Encaladus's south pole?
a ssini-080505.html
Meteor impact, and seismic aftereffects.
After all, it has the "Death Star" moon for a neighbor: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/media/c
Can somebody explain to me how the atmosphere on this moon can be water vapour based when it is so cold. Won't rapid condensation result..followed by freezing?
Or is the water vapor atmosphere being put out by massive jets which are themselves caused by the icy surface being in touch with the molten core?
If these jets do exist they must be huge and it seems likely that whereever these jets exist, that those areas are much warmer than other places on the moon - perhaps even as warm as places on earth.
Anyone who can comment on this?
I would have thought it was bleeding obvious. The shiniest known object in the solar system... inexplicable heat venting from the south polar region... strange elements and compounds in an atmosphere that shouldn't even be there, and so perfectly spherical. It's got to be the interstellar ark that brought us here. Once we finish rendering the Earth uninhabitable, the crew will wake up and carry us all to the next planet that we are destined to trash.
has been making waves ever since it's arrival
"its".
To the moderators: It is absolutely VITAL that you mod this post up, so that the editor and submitter can see it. (This is why I have posted it as close to the top as I can.) Now I know that, in the past, we have had our differences, and you have seen fit to mod my posts down for some inexplicable reason. Please note that this post is ON-TOPIC, because it refers SPECIFICALLY to the article summary. However, if you still feel that you want to mod this post down, rather than up, then please first consider the following:
If you love your country and don't wish to see Western civilization decline, you MUST mod this post up. Remember what President John F. Kennedy said when he corrected Nixon's grammar during the first televised Presidential debates in 1960: "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of 100% correct spelling and grammar among all of its citizens. [...] We choose to correct spelling and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." And, during his inauguration: "Ask not what spell-checking your country can do for you; ask what spell-checking you can do for your country."
Are you a patriot? Do you love your country and eveything for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all? If you do, then MOD THIS POST UP, so that the editors and article submitter can learn from it, so that people everywhere can learn from it, so that those countless heros of the past who gave the last full measure of their devotion, shall not have died in vain. O say, does that Star Spangled Banner yet wave o'er the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave? If you mod this post up, then the answer is YES!
The liberation of the people of Enceladus from their oppressive overlords?
It'll go on for years. Thousands will die. Better that we all learn to ride bicycles.
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
Come on ... that was some funny shit/
"Scientists are baffled! We can't account for polar heating / overlapping flat-bottomed craters on Mars / volcanoes drifting around the surface of Io / particles blasting out of the sun at a quarter of lightspeed / gullies that cross over one another / the enormous explosion out of that comet!"
Of course they're baffled. They won't let anybody competent explain it to them. These guys never studied plasma fluid dynamics in school, and they figure that now they're too old to learn it. Anyway the math was too hard even back then. If they had even one experienced plasma physicist on-staff (or took his gag off) they'd have easy explanations -- at least the beginnings of them -- for most of these things.
As it is, every time they run across something that's unavoidably electromagnetic in character, they're absolutely astonished. Then they instantly forget all about it. Each time, they're astonished anew. Yet it never occurs to them that any new impossibility could also involve similar stuff.
Here's a hint: is there a magnetic field somewhere nearby? That means there's electric current, too, either generating it, or at least being induced by the (conductive) moon moving through it. Where's it flowing? What sort of ions are carrying it, and are transported by it? What happens when they hit a planetary surface? What happens when a charge builds up for a long time, and then gets released? Polar heating... hey, guess where auroras happen? Look at Saturn's poles, in x-rays and infrared.
Jeez. What do we pay these mooncalves for, if they're afraid of fluid dynamics maths? Hire somebody mentally better-equipped.
Four years later than the aliens expected, but not bad for a government operation....
.
.
.
"AC, I have detected an anomaly in the AE35 unit. Probability of failure in 24 hours is %90."
Google calc fun:
((G * (4 / 3) * pi * ((250 km)^3) * ((1 metric ton) / (m^3))) / ((250 km)^2)) / gravity on earth = 0.00712572516
For these less scientifically inclined, assuming Enceladus is like Holland, you go there and buy 3 grams (a tiny box) of ganja, then smuggle back to country.
(gravity on earth / ((G * (4 / 3) * pi * ((250 km)^3) * ((1 metric ton) / (m^3))) / ((250 km)^2))) * (3g of ganja) = 0.928167691 pounds of ganja
That's almost a pound of ganja on Earth surface.
In other news, if you accidentially knock a pizza off the table on Enceladus, you have about 5s to catch it before it falls to the floor.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
according to the illustration on the bottom of the bbc story, enceladus is going to impact great britain in about 5 minutes
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
because enceladus appears to be wonderful place to send hysterical grammar nazis on a one-way trip
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
nt
The timing of the craft's ion and neutral mass spectrometer and the cosmic dust analyzer observations seems to indicate the vapor and fine material are originating from the "hot" polar cap region.
We have only gone and become star trek.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
All the moons, including this one are not newly found. It's an old moon, known for a very long time.
a ssini-051005.html
These interesting moons have one thing in common, they are huge. They have gravity and a core. Without gravity, there will be no atmosphere, and the core might produce geological energies etc. Especially this combination of a core with minerals, and an outer layer of ice/water are interesting in regards to life as this is the combination you need. It's just like Europa (at Jupiter).
Smaller moons might be discovered as time goes by, but if they have eluded detection so far, they only have a size that will deprive them of the above important features. When they are small, the become meteor like, and we might as well check out meteors.
So don't expect any new moons like this to be discovered. Only new information and details about the ones we already know.
In regards to "how many" the number will probably be defined by definition. How big should it be to be a moon? In a sense you might say the rings are millions of tiny moons, but most will probably not say they are within the definition. But what about the big chunks in the rings? Some of the chunks make tracks in the rings... are they considered moons?
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/media/c
So far we have already discovered all the "big" moons.
-:) Oh no - not again.
www.rednebula.com
So if we ever settle Enceladus and put up some tex-mex restaurants we can make new lame sex jokes?
I'm all for it!
That's a Moon!
Saturn's moon Mimas looks very much like the Death Star.
I dunno about the next level, but this one is incredibly well designed. If i only knew what my mission is.
I wonder how big of a cantenna I'd need.....
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
My god! it's full of stars!
"Before humanity, the stars shone throughout the heavens. After humanity [has gone], the stars will continue to shine"
The rule is blindingly simple, but people still get it wrong. If it has an apostrophe, it has to do with who possesses something. Who's book is it?
Singular:
Its he's, her's, it's.
Its your's, min'e.
Plural:
Its our's, your's, their's (British).
Its our's, you'res, there's (American).
Simple, really.
for surfing, you want the Phoenix Asteroids
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this 120 chars is too small to contain.
You might be interested to learn that there is a rule which I have found helps people remember better than the way you've put it:
Pronouns do not take possessive apostrophes.
His, hers, its, theirs, etc. "Its" is not as irregular as people think.
Cheers
J.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
Well, of COURSE it's got a "hot spot", with a name like Enchiladas.
assert(birth_date<time-86400)
eludeus!
(sorry..)
I'm a perfectionist but I'm trying to cut back.
These results were oriinally published in 2004.
Eat sh1t and die, creationists!
Not to sound like a troll, but why are these stories always calling satellites "moons?" We have a real, general word that fits perfectly: SATELLITE. I was going to say that the poster should be using the correct terminology as this is Slashdot, but on second thought, maybe that wouldn't be such a good idea when a lot of people substitute there for their. Oh, the glorious misnomers.
Now I have to move the base again.
The cake is a pie
Should you actually possess the expertise that you claim and not be a 3rd year college student who has 'taken a few classes' or not, your post reminds me of the old adage:
That's true but the press release is clear about it. It basically says "we have no clue what is happening but here are some possibilities". This is a press release after all and hardly a scientific paper. That being said I also get really irritated by the pontificating idiots they sometimes get to explain things who so often gloss over (or ignore) the fact that what they are saying is speculation and not generally accepted fact.
Never mind trotting out black holes, billion-solar-mass black holes, "dark matter" (imagined to constitute 90% of the mass of the universe), "dark energy" (part of it? supposed to repel matter), the "Great Attractor", galactic lensing, "magnetic reconnection", WIMPs, MACHOs, the Big Bang, Inflation, zero-point energy...
It is interesting that we should be talking about wild speculation here because actually dark matter is thought to make up ~23% of the universe and dark energy ~76% (1% being "normal" baryonic, luminous matter). As for the rest gravitational lensing was predicted by Einstein's general relativity before it was observed, zero point energy is a consequence of quantum mechanics (a theory tested to an unprecedented level of precision) and WIMPs are simply candidates for dark matter.
Of course no single experiment, or even a dozen, can do any such thing, and Big Bang is looking iffier every month.
The Big Bang, contrary to your claim, keeps getting more and more experimental backing. Super novae studies and the cosmic microwave background are consistent. Recently the CMB fluctuations lend it further support.
Oh, is it 99% now? How that number keeps growing. It has nowhere to go, now, but asymptotic. Let's project where it will be in five years: 99.999% of the mass of the universe (100,000 times as much mass as the bits we see, a thousand times as much stuff as we needed this year) will be composed of conjectured unobservable particles. They still will have no particular properties, other than whatever it takes to rescue somebody's pet theory. For the next guy's theory, they can have other properties instead, and why not? Falsifiable facts might get falsified, and you'd need to find an honest job.
The Big Bang, contrary to your claim, keeps getting more and more experimental backing.
I.e. backing by an unbounded mass of formless Conjecturons. Do call when you have something, anything compatible with observable evidence. In the meantime, please give the poor Cosmic Background a rest. It's been consistent with every cosmological theory proposed in the last half-century. The universe has to have a blackbody temperature.
As for the rest: there's nothing wrong with gravitational lensing until it's used to avoid seeing what's there. There's nothing wrong with zero-point energy until magic machines are discovered tapped into it just to keep bankrupt theories, er, "inflated".