Slashdot Mirror
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?
Wouldn't the 'equatorial' orbit be coplanar with the rings, not parallel?
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.
done
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
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
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
Just imagine...'Sailing high above Uranus and seeing the Uranus 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.'
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.
FYI, the crappy "ciclops" site is the homepage of the Cassini imaging team: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations.
Are you using "crappy" to mean "Slashdotted"? Seems rather an unfair use of the adjective.
Cool archive
Check out that 4th photo caption. Damn Microsoft and their interplanetary advertising campaign!!!
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
For once, somebody who actually *deserves* goatse
Table-ized A.I.
...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)
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?!?!?
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
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!
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
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.