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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"... :(
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.
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
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.
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!
Enceladus was male, as you can tell by the name. A female would have been named "Encelada," making the mexican food joke even better.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
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
Emphasis on kooky. Refer to this site for a nice debunking of some of Hoagland's claims. Of course, not everything is debunked (the man seems to come up with a new conspiracy theory every week), but it's enough to kill his credibility.
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:
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It's funny, Richard Hoagland is on Coast-to-Coast AM pretty regularly. (What can I say? I'm an insomniac and it's an entertaining show.) On the radio, he sounds very smart and usually quite rational. The web site, on the other hand, is so kooky it's almost hard to believe that it's written by the same person. He seems to be extremely fond of zooming waaay in on heavily compressed JPEG images and imagining all kinds of artificial formations in the compression artifacts. I wonder sometimes if he really believes all this stuff, or if it's just a ploy to get attention and presumably bring in $$$.
FWIW, his own biography says he was a museum curator, a NASA consultant (whatever that means), and a science advisor to CBS news. It's a more impressive resumé than your garden variety conspiracy nut, but he wasn't exactly a "big wig at NASA".
This means that the water ice either rapidly falls back to the surface, or else is the source of material for Saturn's icy F(I think) ring, which is basically a line of water ice circling Saturn.
What makes this discovery interesting is that in order for there to be a detectable atmosphere on Enceladus, there must be some process as it cannot last by itself.
Hopefully the Cassini mission will reveal that source in time.
"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.
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"
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
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