Radio Wave on Saturn's Moon Hints at Hidden Ocean

SleepyHappyDoc writes "The European Space Agency has announced that a mysterious radio wave may indicate the existence of a hidden ocean underneath the surface of Titan. The Cassini-Huygens spaceprobe, which entered Titan's atmosphere over two years ago, collected evidence and information which has led to this potential discovery. This technology may lead to entirely new ways of finding out information about other planets."

Comments

"Mysterious wave"

[N7DR]

The European Space Agency has announced that a mysterious radio wave...

And there's no point in reading TFA in order to try to remove any of the mystery. Frequency? Duration? Periodicity/repeatability? Any characteristics whatsoever? Not a single useful property is mentioned in the article. In fact, apparently it's not even certain that it's not an artifact.

Actually, the whole thing is a rather weird: not only do they not give any details whatsoever, but I find it difficult to countenance that a scientist would talk about a "radio wave" rather than a "signal" or "emission" in this context. Speaking from my background as a co-investigator on the Planetary Radio Astronomy experiment on Voyager, the word "wave" is usually reserved for theoretical treatments in published papers.

Anyway, I guess we just have to wait for the upcoming issue of "Planetary and Space Science" to see what the article is really talking about.

Re:"Mysterious wave"

[ferd_farkle]

A quick googling turns up http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/whycassi ni/cassinif-20070601-02.html,
an article with considerably more explanation, including that they are investigating through actual simulation whether it could be an artefact of the instrument.

wait...

[jcgam69]

The next step for the researchers is to determine if the signal detected was the result of an error in the probe. Shouldn't you do that first before making a major announcement to the world press??