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Cassini Finds Evidence of Water
CheshireCatCO writes "Scientists working on the Cassini Mission think that they have found compelling evidence for the existence of liquid water at the south pole of the moon Enceladus. In addition to the obvious puzzles relating to how temperatures can be held high enough for liquid water, the presence of water, as well as the detection of organic molecules, opens up the possibility for life at Enceladus's south polar region. The findings are to appear in the 10 March issue of the journal, Science"
2. Bottle the icy-cold water
3. Ship bottles to Earth
4. Sell "Enceladus Springs" at outrageous prices
5. (Need I say more?)
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Attempt no
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Funny sigs make your Karma go down.
That's the perfect place for me and my rag-tag band of misfit rebels to establish a secret base! I just hope that taun-taun life is sustainable there.
Yeah, I know a *true geek* such as typically is found on /. will know this without looking it up, but for those afraid to ask...
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Do they know that it's Water as in H2O or simply a liquidy viscuous substance that shoots from a small opening at the tip of the moon?
...while I run out to light up my giant "WELCOME TO EARTH" sign.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
In the spring of 2008, scientists will get another chance to look at Enceladus when Cassini flies within 350 kilometers (approximately 220 miles), but much work remains after Cassini's four-year prime mission is over.
We need a closer look, but it would be interesting to gather some samples of this water and see if it contains microorganisms of any kind.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Hopefully people just don't read the headline: " Cassini Finds Evidence of Water." Well, duh... I found water along time ago. ;)
Did you all purposely do this?
All /. comment so far have nothing to do with the news. *sigh* Always the same with astronomy items.
An interesting thing about this news item was that the NASA press release announcement regarding "something massive" was assumed to be a declaration from NASA stating that they had found life elsewhere.
I'd love to see a rover there.
Wonder what is causing the warm temps.
Is there any reason the oficial NASA site fails to mention this is a -joint- project with the ESA? Just curious. Or was the Huygens probe the ESA part of Cassini-Huygens?
Isn't moving water a bit difficult to freeze, because of friction? Could this (if it is water,) be moving at fast speeds?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
...it's an Evian station!
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I for one, welcome our Cassinian Microbial Overlords.
1. Send equipment to southern Enceladus
2. Bottle the icy-cold water
3. Ship bottles to Earth
4. Sell "Enceladus Springs" for low low price
5. Sell cure for Andromeda Strain's revenge at outrageous prices.
1) Suggest a possible discovery of liquid water out there
2) Make allusion to possibility of life emerging there
3) ???
4) Grant Funding!
I'm as much a fan of discovery as the next scientifically minded person, but this has become a little tired in recent years. Every time a possible discovery of liquid water creeps up, the potential for life always follows in the very next paragraph if not the next sentence. One would wonder what would happen if we found a vast reservoir of liquid water but no life in it. I imagine some segment of astrobiology would be so incredulous as to insist on probing it until an earth born microbe manages to survive the trip and contaminate the discovery.
When I was first reading this I thought "Wow, wouldn't it be interesting to figure out how liquid water could have existed there." Then came the inevitable "hey, maybe there's life there!" I just gave up. The conditions for liquid water are remarkable enough, do we need to include the outrageously small probability of life developing before we've looked at the more answerable questions like "where's the heat coming from?"
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
Neat page w/video
I've heard of water as cold as -40C.
Man, you really need that seminar!
www.cfnews13.com
or is it liquid due to being compressed due to the denser air of the moon?
One wonders what it's exact chemical makeup - and impurities or compounds - are.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
1) Suggest a possible discovery of liquid water out there
...
2) Make allusion to possibility of life emerging there
3) ???
4) Grant Funding!
Well, the avian-human transmission of influenza was actually discovered by a research scientist who wanted an excuse to go surfing in Australia, so he proposed a grant to study if seabirds were a reservoir for influenza that infects humans.
Turns out they were. Plus, he got some good surf in.
So, maybe we should investigate the surfing potential of this moon, and maybe we'll discover a cure for cancer
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The editors changed my story link. My original submission had http://www.ciclops.org/ which has not only the press-release but several supporting images which might be of interested. Granted, our server is feeling the load pretty badly at the moment, but that'll probably ease up in a little while.
He's had a banner running on this for several hours before /.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
It's oil. Now we can get our petrol without having to rely on those unstable sources like Canada.
Er, it is "Enceladean", right?
They reported the same stuff about a year ago. Water mixed with ammonia is heated by an unstable crust and ejects into space at superheated temperatures. This keeps the surface relatively smooth. What, are they now MORE convinced that this is water?
Speaking as someone who worked this: no we didn't. We knew that there was a plume earlier but as far as we knew it was warm ice that produced it. And that wasn't a year ago that we announced the discovery of the plume, either.
The new measurements suggest that there too much water vapor in the plume to be warm ice and it almost has to be liquid water.
Also, there is no detection of ammonia so far.
If you look at a temperature map of Enceladus, it's still quite cold, perhaps 100 degrees Kelvin. With virtually no pressure, it's enough to cause evaporation and the formation of water. There's a good write-up here.
So, don't expect to see exotic creatures swimming about. It might end up being a great place to mine for water, however, supporting future colonies of Saturn. The moon has virtually no gravity, so you could practically throw it off the surface (well, not really - the escape velocity is 212 m/s).
So say there are organisms that live on Saturn's moon. My fear is that they are extremely efficient at utilizing resources since they probably don't have many resources there. If we all of a sudden bring them back to earth where the resources for are that much higher then how do we know they won't spread unstopably and destroy us all?
Good point. Let's alert the President and he can declare war against said organisms since they might have WMDs. Or Oil. I'm sure one of those two things will get his attention ...
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Pluto is made of solid matter. The Earth is made of solid matter (it least its surface has a large solid component). There are computers on Earth. So maybe there are computers on Pluto. I vote that we allocate funds to NASA to research this hypothesis.
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
I remember seeing a doco about one of Neptune's moons (I forget which, it was at least 5 years ago).
;-)
That moon had oceans of Nitrogen, with a frozen nitrogen surface. Scientists thought that the energy to thaw the oceans came from the elliptical orbit of the moon. this caused variations in gravity which contorted the core of the moon - producing heat.
Pretty awesome, IMO..
If we found life on this moon, and our probe destryed it all, it likely had a very fragile grip anyway, and likely wouldn't have lasted. Also, if we found life on this moon, it would indicate that life in space is likely common. That being the case, one moon in the long run would not be a huge deal. This of course is a worse case scenerio. You can be sure that this worse case scenerio would also lead to massive support by the public to increase space exploration.
Now I can ship myself and a ton of robots and equipment there and begin to fufill my evil plans...
I will have the first wave of gas staions, drive-throughs, and Starbucks on the spacelanes and secure a monopoly all for myself!
Bwahahaha! Monopoly! I feel like Bill Gates...
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"...might have WMDs. Or Oil."
You mean might be WMDs. Or Oil.
A lot of people are overlooking something rather important. If we plan to eventually colonise any extra-terrestrial location, we're going to need to be pretty good at identifying critical resources based on observations made at great distance. Even if there proves to be no water this time around, it will result in researchers coming up with a more accurate means of detecting the presence of liquid water, which will serve us elsewhere.
That said, obviously we don't want to ruin our own solar system seeing as the probability of humans travelling beyond it's reaches is a value approaching zero and so local planets and their moons may prove our only practical option.
I say it's the whole Enceladus!
BTM
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
WMD stands for Weapons of Mass Destruction. It's already plural, there is no need to put an 's' on the end. In doing so, you have effectively said Weapons of Mass Destructions.
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WMD stands for Weapons of Mass Destruction. It's already plural, there is no need to put an 's' on the end. In doing so, you have effectively said Weapons of Mass Destructions.
Well, since these are from biotic lifeforms using organic buckyball circuitry on a distant moon, they're better than your usual Weapons of Mass Destruction, on the order of a gazillion times more power, and are thus Weapons of Mass Destructions.
Now, given that their are readily available supplies of ice, I suggest we get our mutated space trout to use their frickin lasers to find some ice cubes, so that we can set up an iced coffee stand on the moon, in anticipation of record profits from all the visiting spaceships.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Less powerful organizations can simply refuse to pass on any more embargoed stories to the individual who breaks the embargo; it's a judgement call as to whether that's going to be worthwhile.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
They already have water parks.
Enchiladas is my favorite moon of Saturn.
Assuming they are the things I sometimes get at Taco Bell.
Meh.
See - the water on this little moon is boiling away due to "Global Warming" so this is yet ANOTHER example of the failed Eco policy of this administration!
Have you compiled your kernel today??
From the Space.com article on the same subject:
The moon is only the third other body in the Solar System - Earth, Jupiter's moon Io and possibly Neptune's moon Triton are the others - known to have active volcanic processes, researchers said.
Volcanoes are hot and provide energy.
Energy and water are two very important things life needs to survive. This puts Enceladus towards the top of the list of places where life may also exist in our solar system.
In the spring of 2008, scientists will get another chance to look at Enceladus when Cassini flies within 350 kilometers (approximately 220 miles)
Actually, the new altitude for that flyby will be 25 km. Boo Yah!
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
lighting a match, perhaps? ;)
Don't know why we are looking for water and air. Wouldn't it be possible for X (life?) Y (live?) without these things. Isnt it we (life on earth) adapted ourselves to consume these things air, water, air-in-water, etc.
... especially when Cassini gets shot down by the Enceladians because it's interfering with their military frequencies and -- more importantly -- their satellite TV transmissions.
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And humans...
And Americans...
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Stupid soggy snacks!
When they find a beer geyser, let me know.
"Warm" ice? I drank some of that this morning.
NASA is waiting to release information about the discovered life forms, but only after they are able to determine whether they know about Jesus or not.
What good is galactic life if it isn't saved? All Marklarks will be marklarred.
Brian
Why are we trying to find water on other planets when we 80% of our planet is covered in it?
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Sorry....wrong forum..
A goal is a dream with a deadline
I wonder why the OP submitted links to .nasa.gov. Is he trying to conceal that this is a European Space Agency project which is well documented at www.esa.int?
the pet peeve is just a sign of your grammar becoming obsolete, and your personal clash with the future, with changing times. like a person who can't stand "impact" as a verb.
do you have a problem with "laser" being pluralized in a traditional way? lasers.
"WMD" is only ARGUABLY "already plural". and in any case, the abbreviation destroys the overt pluralization of the constitutent term, if it was in fact there to begin with. that's why people pluralize the abbreviation. they have the opposite sense that you do.
and you're making your point even though you think it's a "stupid" peeve. that's interesting.
most abbreviations that i can think of have their head noun at the end. "Weapons OF [bla bla bla]" is rare as far as i can tell, with the preposition. this also might be a reason why people tend to pluralize the abbreviation: they're used to pluralizing in an overt meaningful way, so they do it even in situations that peeve you.
anyway, it's blatantly false-- or at least misleading-- to say that the speaker "effectively said weapons of mass destructionS." do you really want to argue that within the speaker's own mind, or conception, they were actually pluralizing "destruction"?
they didn't "effectively" say that at all. only according to your pedantic, asocial parse did the speaker say that. IN FACT, the "s" on WMD should serve as extremely convincing evidence to YOU that the person did not internally represent anything like "destructions." clearly, "WMD" is singular by default to them, which is why they pluralized the entire expression.
the sound shape and syntactic pattern of everything that you yourself utter was a peeve to somebody at some point in the past. that "somebody" is a bygone generation.
your philosophy also doesn't leave much recourse for a soldier who finds a single weapon of mass destruction. if "WMD" is already pluralized, then that soldier is in a world of hurt. please, think of the soldiers.
Additional spinoffs: latex thin, ultra comfy warm wet/drysuits.
...Get some doo-gooders to ship off all great whites there when he's done.
Then set up a fund for artificial reef creation. Over here.
Man, gotta love this waterproof pda...