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Cassini Returns Amazing New Imagery from Saturn
SeaDour writes "The Cassini spacecraft has recently entered a highly-inclined orbit around Saturn, revealing some never-before-seen images of the planet's ring system as seen from above and below the planet. 'Sailing high above Saturn and seeing the rings spread out beneath us like a giant, copper medallion is like exploring an alien world we've never seen before. It just doesn't look like the same place. It's so utterly breath-taking, it almost gives you vertigo.' The spacecraft will eventually return to its standard orbit parallel to the ring plane in late June."
I mean, its neat and all, but is showing a different perspective, that really provides no new information, really worth all those over-the-top effusive words? "Alien world we've never seen before"? Or just one we have seen before, but from a 45 degree different angle?
I want new pictures of Uranus
heh, we might not be seeing anything at all, /.'ed
only two comments posted, and its already
Wouldn't the 'equatorial' orbit be coplanar with the rings, not parallel?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Go here http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/index .cfm
to get bigger and more images from NASA, instead of the currently ddo.. I mean /.ed news sites.
The linked photo site was almost immediately Slashdotted so I'm not sure what they contained, but there are pictures on NASA's site here:
0 070301.html
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/media/2
The site seems about 10 seconds from being fully /.ed, better photos available from NASA anyway.
Full size image
Cool archive
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
Forget the crappy "ciclops" site, try NASA...x .cfm
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/inde
seeing the rings spread out beneath us like a giant, copper medallion is like exploring an alien world we've never seen before.
Its too bad Mars (probably) doesn't have tangible rings. Because as they say, "if you can't support a medallion, you can't support a family". And if you can't support a family, then you must be a liberal arts major and trying to colonize Mars.
Or something
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
What site would you propose instead? Everyone's got a perspective. I don't see why Xinhua's would be any less useful, for a story like this, than that of any other major news outlet.
comma
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/overview/index.cfm
Cassini-Huygens is an international collaboration between three space agencies. Seventeen nations contributed to building the spacecraft. The Cassini orbiter was built and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Huygens probe was built by the European Space Agency. The Italian Space agency provided Cassini's high-gain communication antenna. More than 250 scientists worldwide are studying the data streaming back from Saturn on a daily basis.
--ob
I suspect that the term "parallel" was chosen because "coplanar" isn't as widely understood among the general public. When writing press-releases they have to strike a delicate balance between complete accuracy and comprehension. There's a sort of perverse Heisenberg Uncertainty principle at play, there.
And where would that be exactly? Surely, by convention the probe is above the planet - wherever it is in its orbit?
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
...planet. Y'know, it doesn't have the same ring(s) to it.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
That's it, I've had it with the crappy views down here, I'm moving to Saturn!
How do you tell above vs. below in the context?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Great site to gain insight into the way the Chinese view the world. The site is not that radical really, I'm sure they don't allow everything, but it is not bad. Try fox news for mouthpieces of dicataorships
Isn't Cassini the name of a Sega Saturn emulator?
I'm not anti-microsoft. I'm anti-bullshit. Which means I'm anti-microsoft.
Thanks to American taxpayers for footing a couple hundred million dollars for some great desktop backgrounds.
Am I the *only* one here who noticed the extensive glacial retreat evident when comparing these images to the ones from when it arrived in 2004?!?!?
Oh, right, because any political system that isn't an outright representative democracy is a dictatorship. Please travel more, or at least just get an education.
comma
...fly that thing into one of the more placid ring planes and really get attention.
--
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
Can we determine the best way to make artificial shepherd moons to steer the particles into large ore harvesting facilities? Let's get this space colonization started, wooooo! Seriously, are rings and planets around gas giants good places to setup shop for the outer solar system? I mean Titan alone can provide billions of tons of methane.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
violetperplex@yahoo.com
Now this is more "amazing" to me:e -details.cfm?imageID=2502
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/imag
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Thanks for making me laugh for minutes non-stop on this Monday morning.
Fox is a nice example of freedom. Everybody (in the EU) know it.
Anyone ever wondered how nicely cutted news people at US get?
Oooh, oooh, I'll bite!
The USA the source of modern civilization? Ahh, you mean the bit where we throw lawsuits at everything, have child obesity, encourage the stripping of freedoms in the name of fighting terror, and nobody save for a few small breweries can produce a decent pint anymore? I could go on, but I don't have a week to spare.
You'd be better off looking to Britain for most of the western world's basic laws, the Middle East for a lot of philosopical and medical stuff, Central Europe and China for engineering, and Australia for a great many sports. As far as I'm aware the US's contribution is a better hamburger and something to laugh at (The current administration for example).
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
"Oh, right, because any political system that isn't an outright representative democracy is a dictatorship. Please travel more, or at least just get an education."
Wow! The grandparent is a moron, but the parent is also something special. We're hair splitting, but I'll bite. Every government system that is not an outright representative democracy IS a dictatorship. What do monarchies, dictatorships, theocracies, oligarchies, etc. all have in common? The common citizen has no legal recourse for changing his government when he feels his country is being governed badly. The terms are different, but the effect is the same.
Even Bush overplayed his hand and has had his wings clipped by the American electorate.
I don't know. Something in the western hemisphere would be nice, if only for the decreased load times.
After all, I am strangely colored.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
chinese? don't mix up chinese with the chinese communist party. There are other chinese as well. People in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the diaspora hardly view the world like the communist mainland chinese. Your comment is borderline racist you do know that right?
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
oh i wasnt aware of the fact that foxnews was an arm of the government and the only news source in the country. thanks for enlightening me. I wonder what that CBS, NBC,MSNBC, ABC, CNN stuff means.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Can we determine the best way to make artificial shepherd moons to steer the particles into large ore harvesting facilities?
Yes, if we have about another century of experience with robotic spacecraft. Of course, we won't get that if we burn most of our space budget on joy rides to the moon and Mars, both of which will likely get canceled before they ever get off the ground.
The only reason Saturn, Mars, and Earth would all warm up simultaneously would be from changes in solar output, which would endanger the grants of hundreds of atmospheric scientists who've bet their (and their grad students) careers on the cause being atmospheric CO2!
Best Slashdot Co
Don't forget the invention of pizza (ok, the idea to put stuff on a flat dough and bake it wasn't all that new, but to name it 'pizza' was) and Chop Suey (which was invented as a 'chinese style' meal for U.S. americans).
It's not slashdotted, it's just the latency you get when you download a movie from Saturn. The round trip takes more than two hours, please be patient.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Dang, I wish I paid for the cheap, discounted space agency you apparently contract out to for great desktop backgrounds! The Cassini project actually will cost about 3.2 billion dollars. (Portions paid in Euros, because our friends in Europe decided that they, too, had too much taxpayer money on hand). See: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/faq/mission.cfm
(Incidentally, 3.2 billion is also how much karma I have lost for pasting that link on Cassini stories. Let no one say that I'm unwilling to sacrifice for science.)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Well at least not by the carbon-based sentient life forms on the 3rd planet from the sun in this very same solar system.
Magic Eight Ball: Outlook not so good., Hmmm, how about Excel and Word?
Interesting to see the planet from a new angle...
http://nathanlindsell.blogspot.com/
Spare me your anti-American B.S. The U.S. has been a leader in modern technology for a long time. Europe and China provided the foundation for mechanical and chemical engineering. The bulk of modern electrical engineering came from the U.S.
The computer you typed your post on almost certainly used a CPU made by an American company, for example. Intel, AMD, Cyrix/NatSemi... the only major one I'm aware of that is not a U.S. company is VIA (Japanese company). The first microprocessors were invented approximately simultaneously by Intel and Texas Instruments---both U.S. companies.
The first transistor? Bell Labs---also an American company. In fact, you have to go all the way back to vacuum tubes before you see anybody else with a critical invention, and even then, only if you consider CRT (German) or X-Ray emitter (English) tubes. The concept of valves (vacuum tubes used for amplifiers, logic, etc.) was an American invention.
Light bulb? Nope. Invented by an Englishman. However, his prototype wasn't particularly usable. It wasn't until Edison (an American) experimented with hundreds of types of filament material that we got something remotely approaching a viable light bulb.
So you see, the U.S. has contributed a LOT in the past... less so in the recent past, perhaps, but I blame that on decades of Republicans cutting education spending. Don't get me wrong, the U.S. spends more per student than most countries. The problem is that the education system is poorly organized with far too much local control, resulting in severe redundancy across the system. The result is that even though we spend more, our teachers are the lowest paid educated profession in our country. Both my parents are teachers, so I know what I'm talking about here.
We have two choices: centralize more of the bureaucracy (which most taxpayers will never go for, since they don't want to lose control of "their" schools) or spend a lot more money to raise teachers' salaries to something more reasonable. And the problem won't be fixed in a day. It will take at least a couple of generations with teachers earning good (at or above median educated) salaries before teaching will be seen as an attractive career among the best and brightest.
In the grand scheme of things, it probably doesn't matter much which of these directions we take as a nation, but if we don't do one of those things, we will continue to see the U.S. slipping behind in science and math education, in innovation, and in intellectual ability in general, and in a hundred years or so, your "Americans haven't contributed anything useful" statement might cease to be far from the truth.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Unless the spaceship is extraordinarily busy, they should be capturing movies of their orbits over the poles. On at least one orbit, they should capture color, wide angle mosaics of the entire planet during the entire orbit and reconstruct a wide field orbit movie. Such a movie would be over 4000x4000 resolution and when projected in IMAX, possibly the most amazing sight humans have ever had.
The same thing should be done on Mars, with the rovers shooting an entire day of wide angle mosaics to reconstruct a timelapse movie of a day on Mars.
Of course, they won't have the imagination or the clockcycles to do it.
Not disagreeing with you (actually I came to conclusion it's not worth to read the parent post you were replying to...). But...you might recheck your facts about CPU's. :>
The most widely used architecture in the world is...British: ARM. In 2005, 1.7 billion chips were manufactured. And they're everywhere.
Also there's Hitachi/Renesas...
One that hath name thou can not otter
I'm well aware of ARM, but it's not a computer CPU. It's an embedded CPU. I'm not aware of ARM in use in any traditional computers at this time, though it might have been in the distant past. Also, ARM is a family of chips, and while ARM holdings is a British company, AFAIK, they mostly license the tech to other manufacturers like Marvell (Intel's spun-off XScale arm) and Texas Instruments to manufacture it.
Also, while the original ARM architecture was designed by Acorn (a British company), that's not the whole story. Apple (an American company) worked with Acorn to significantly improve the CPU in the ARM6 incarnation. It was not until after this collaboration that the ARM processor was used by anyone other than Acorn. ARM6 was the first 32-bit version of the chip, thus the first of what most people would consider modern ARM chips..
And the other three of the top four embedded architectures (PowerPC, x86, and MIPS) were all designed by American companies.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Ahh... technology != civilisation.
Try again.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?