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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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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?
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
Did you all purposely do this?
...it's an Evian station!
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
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)
All of the NASA money is going into manned space programs. Money for the science space program depends on how much money is left over from updating the website.
All /. comment so far have nothing to do with the news. *sigh* Always the same with astronomy items.
/. posts are just people cracking stupid jokes.
The news: The most simple and common combination of two extremely common elements might have been noticed on a large rock, very far away.
Like most astronomy news, it's incredibly boring unless you let your imagination run wild and start dreaming about colonies, alien life, or other flights of fancy... so it's no surprise that most of the
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
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.
It generally has to be pretty clean water, too, at least from what I've observed. We put bottles of filtered water in the fridge here at work all the time, and it supercools - if you're careful, you can drink some nice, below 32F water, but if you shake it up or bump the bottle too much, the water will crystalize into an icy slush. Pretty neat trick. Unfiltered water just seems to freeze solid in the freezer, though.
JRjr
It's oil. Now we can get our petrol without having to rely on those unstable sources like Canada.
The current theory is found in this link
Anything that seeds the crystallization will do - an ice crystal works best, but particles or shock will do.
I had a bottle of cider camping (I don't know the temperature, but my kerosene froze) that stayed liquid until I opened it. Spiderwebs of ice forming inside, quite beautiful, followed by the crack of the bottle breaking.
Man, you really need that seminar!
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?
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.
That sounds like Triton, although I don't think we have any direct detections of a nitrogen ocean. There are certainly plumes erupting from the surface, though, so it's definiately possible.
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...
The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. - William Gibson
Actually, the news in this case:
The most simple and common combination of two extremely common elements might exist on a large rock, very far away, in a form that shouldn't be possible based on our current understanding of the conditions there.
You might not find that to be interesting, and may even be in the majority, but for people who are interested in that field, possibly finding something completely unexpected (not the water part, but the liquid state) is pretty interesting.
Am I suggesting that people leap up and down and hoot and holler over this? No, but I'm not suggesting that people should treat this as just "more of the same" either.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.