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Pictures of Titan's Lakes
sighted writes "For decades, scientists have wondered if the thick orange haze that shrouds Saturn's giant moon Titan hid lakes of liquid methane on the surface, but there was no way to confirm it, until now. The Cassini flyby of July 22, 2006 took these striking images and were released today."
Or...God has a leaky blue pen
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Swimming in liquid farts
I spend most of my time in bed, darling.
I heard they wander around the Solar system wrecking anything they see.
You mean "more evidence suggesting liquid"?
Hardly proof.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
...of a ringworld actually. Now to texture map it to a 3D model of one.
This other location at the Cassini site, and this older article from the BBC.
The original article is in the journal Nature, but you need a subscription to view it. You can still read the abstract, though.
I'm surprised this isn't being reported as evidence that cows once lived on Titan.
Maybe the methane came from Uranus? Sorry. :)
I can understand that if we found liquid water elsewhere in the solar system it should make news, but who cares about liquid methane? Afterall Jupiter (http://www.nineplanets.org/jupiter.html) has "exotic" liquid metallic hydrogen and liquid helium. I doubt it is possible to drive any biologically important reactions at the temperatures present on Titan. We simply confirmed that our knowledge of the methane phase diagram is correct. Let me know if they find something useful, like platinum or palladium on Phobos...
Why did it take them 6 months to release the images?
unzip ; strip ; touch ; grep ; find ; finger ; mount ; fsck ; more ; yes ; fsck ; umount ; sleep
it is good that the liqid question is answered, as liquid methane is somthing that some view as possible environ of life, just as those who believe water on Mars means likely life. The issue though is whether conditions were ever favorable enough, long enough for life to develope. If we establish Titan's parameters, and Mar's parameters, we might come up with some of the values in drakes equation http://www.activemind.com/Mysterious/Topics/SETI/d rake_equation.html
the answeres might not be what we want, however
A fun read. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(Stephen_Baxter )
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
...The whole ringworld!
It could last from a persons teens, into middle age, with no repeats...
Could be you would turn Into a pak before finishing...
I just want One trip into a planet at high speed in a General Products hull. (With stasis field at the end, of course...but that last second would look really cool!)
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Am I the only one who can remember that we put a lander on Titan a good 18 months prior to taking this image? The presence of liquid methane on the surface was confirmed one week later. Nice image, bad caption.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
>It could last from a persons teens, into middle age, with no repeats...
It took me that long to read all the books, although I could have done without "Throne."
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
So, did they finally find the Sirens?
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
...except Minnesota seems way colder that Titan.
... have known it for a long time.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
Wow, Finally a way to get this administration to fund space exploration. Petroleum.
Now if we could only start a rumor there are weapons of mass destruction, terrorist training camps, and Oceans of petroleum product on Titan, we could leave Iraq, and start a gold rush like rocket race to Saturn's moon.
Ye Ha , lakes full or petro.
Cheers
* Carthago Delenda Est *
... or is the lake near the middle of the picture shaped like a giant fish? No wonder the Face on Mars has vanished, he's gone fishing on Titan!
If you don't produce a steady stream of non-achievements people might start saying things like "Hey, what did that 3.26 billion dollars (http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/faq/mission.cfm) we just gave you for the Cassini project actually accomplish?" This way, you can say "Hey, the Cassini project CONFIRMED the existence of LIQUID which is almost like WATER which is a prerequisite for LIFE which would be the BIGGEST DISCOVERY EVER."
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Dad? Is it really you?
"The images are blatantly false-colour. The blue areas meant to potray liquid (making people think of water) but could just as easily be ice or lava flows."
Actually the intensity of the backscatter data is what is being shown.
The brightness is logarithmic, therefore anything dark is very smooth
and anything really bright is very bumpy. Since it is a log scale and
there is a good idea what kind of backscatter to absorption ratio to expect
from the synthetic aperture radar for various targets, they can conclude that
the dark patches are glassy/ice-rink flat.
They can also conclude that the dark patches could be liquid based on
change detection, provided they have another series of overlapping data
to compare. If the glassy areas undulate slightly between images (waves)
they are probably liquid.
Having noted this, 500 metres is kind of crappy resolution for
SAR data. You'd think they'd make a closer flyby or put a better
instrument onboard. I believe 1 (one) metre resolution SAR was available
from instruments at the same altitude when cassini was designed.
NASA just cheaped out.
Having noted this, 500 metres is kind of crappy resolution for
SAR data. You'd think they'd make a closer flyby or put a better
instrument onboard. I believe 1 (one) metre resolution SAR was available
from instruments at the same altitude when cassini was designed.
NASA just cheaped out.
Cheaped out? Cassinni is the most expensive unmanned probe ever launched. I saw a to-scale model in a museum. It is a huge chunk of gadgets. Perhaps you could argue they underemphasized radar power at the expense of something else, but you cannot argue they went cheap.
Table-ized A.I.
If I were Bin Laden (which I'm not btw) I'd think seriously about getting a life sized model of myself up to Titan. The sight of it floating in one of those methane lakes would take the pressure off for sure.
LOL, he was making a joke about the fact that fart gas is methane and there are oceans of liquid methane on Titan. He didn't ask for a complete analysis of fart gas and whether it's possible to liquefy a fart and the liquid still technically consist of "fart" material.
:) So, you can relax and no worry about getting caught!
At least if you fart while you're swimming, your bubbles might not make it to the surface for everyone to see cause they might liquefy and join the existing liquid methane
Hey, there are pretty pictures, too. Plus, I can think of 355 billion dollars spent a lot less wisely.
Looks more like to me they found Halo, took it's heightmap data and are trying to say they actually saw something on Titan.
HAHAHAHAHA. Oh who ever knew that quoting Jim Carey could be flamebait.
I don't think this is conclusive. As one of the other earlier posts said, they have taken the rough areas and coloured them rock colour, and taken the smooth areas and coloured them water colour. At the edge of these 'lake' features there are intermediate regions which are pretty flat and might be either shallow lake or a flat shore. Or something else completly different.
The article suggests we will in time know what we have. It is probably not sand because there aren't any dunes. If they are lakes, then the lake height ought to change with the seasons. In the meantime colouring it blue isn't really helping.
When I was a lad, Venus was believed to have huge oceans of soda water. Mars had a canal system. Tintin 'Destination Moon' book had underground ice on the moon. In the last fifty years we have visited all sorts of extraordinary places, and everywhere has turned out to be pretty dry. The lander shots of Titan looked just like a coastline, but that was not wet. There is an intriguing trickle of something in a crater on Mars. So far, the more we look, the less we find, and the more sceptical I get. Is this sort of thing really necessary to get funding for space exploration?
"There's farts in them thar hills!" doesn't have the same appeal.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
It was renamed to Urectum, just to end that lame joke once and for all.
But now I'm afraid we need something new to end that Urectum joke.
You just got troll'd!
Given two arguments, one expressing two possible explanations for the evidence (the high radar absorption) and discounting one of these due to its unlikelihood, and another one saying "All the evidence for water before turned out to be wrong" the former is much more convincing. Because it is a scientific argument based on evidence. The false colour is irrelevant - the areas of low radar reflection still need an explanation, and "lake" is currently the most likely. You also seem to be under the impression that these are water lakes, which they are not.
Furthermore, they have not taken the rough areas and coloured them rock, etc, they have taken the dark areas and coloured them blueish, and the light areas brown. Smoothness has nothing to do with it, since this is not a height map but a radar reflection map.
im in ur
"Cheaped out? "
Yeah, that was a bit over the top. Sorry about that.
I have heard Cassini called a Cadillac, Battlestar Galactica,..., but never cheap! Increased spatial resolution won't help you see 50 km diameter lakes any better. The embayment relationships with topography are the same, as is the radar darkness of the lake surface. It might detect tributary streams. I suppose an extremely powerful radar might see waves on the lake surface. Cassini may even be able to detect those locally.
an ill wind that blows no good
For the record, liquid water on Mmars hasn't been ruled out. Maybe you missed it, but a few weeks ago they found new channels that appear to have been formed by flowing water.
Urcornhole sounds innocuous enough.
You honestly believe that the Earth is the only place in the Universe that ANY form of matter can be found in a liquid state?
Wow, the odds that one of the three fundamental states of matter exists on only one of the trillions of rocks in the universe are so poor it actually boggles the mind to contemplate how poor they are. I mean, there are a lot of forms of matter and they turn liquid at different temps. Each of those rocks floating around out there houses lots of different forms of matter and each contains a different temperature range. Each of the trillions of rocks has what, a few thousand potential liquids and if even one, anywhere, has even a drop of liquid then you are wrong. It doesn't have to be life bringing liquid, after all the methane lakes they are talking about here couldn't support any form of life that we know of.
Pretty old stuff.
Just because they just now put a flyover-perspective, color-coded image on their website doesn't make this news.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Sometimes scientists see what they want to see (because it's their pet theory or because it will capture them headlines/grant money). Sometimes the data turns out to be bad, or unexpectedly flawed.
We'll see. But let's not start patting anyone on the back until we have some more solid corroborating data.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I have been out of the planetary science business for a long time. I am not aware of any studies relating Titan's general circulation (which must be well known) to observable wave height on lakes. Does the low gravity, (presumably) high surface stress, and large lake size create large waves? The circulation is already known to be vigorous to produce ice-sand dunes. That would make an interesting Master's project. I don't think there are *any* other driving mechanisms other than wind.
an ill wind that blows no good
Well, I have no problems with that. Reservation is something that seems all to often to be lacking, from all kinds of people.
im in ur