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Spacecraft to Fly Through Geyser Plumes On Saturn Moon
Riding with Robots writes "Today the robotic Saturn probe Cassini will make its closest buzz ever over the surface of the enigmatic ice moon Enceladus, whose surprising giant water geysers hint at a hidden ocean of liquid water. The spacecraft will fly right through the tops of the geyser plumes in order to sample the material that originated beneath the surface. NASA is offering a video, interactive guide and image gallery in advance of the event."
It can really analyse the water samples? Wow, I'm impressed.
NASA really wants the probe to get a wash down.
I should add that although the closest approach to Enceladus is happening as I type this, Cassini won't have a chance to turn its antenna toward Earth until later this evening (U.S. time). The downlink will take several hours, so the first pictures probably won't be publicly available until tomorrow.
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I already sampled the water from the geysers on Enceladus back in '78 at a Greatful Dead concert.
Tasted kind of sweet with a hint of mint.
NASA needs to get with the times. They've got 30 years of catching up to do.
If they don't have wipers on their nice expensive spaceship isn't there a chance they could ruin the camera images with droplets and splattered bugs etc?
liqbase
We need a nice, interactive "Google Saturn" to help us along the way.
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... for the rings of ...
sorry.
+1 fashionably cynical
Well, the initial plans called for wipers, but that would have required another .4 kg of expensive plutonium pellets in the RTG, and the added mass of the motor, intermittent-wipe controller, and the mechanism for changing spare wiper blades would have meant that the hermetically sealed capsule containing the Blob (frozen by Steve McQueen in the 1950s) would have been bumped to another deep-space probe.
Maybe it will find something like the andromeda strain.
Now, that would be something.
I remember the good old days when they'd tell you to rewrite your book report for talking about water in space.
"I guess I'm gonna fade into Bolivian."
That's no moon!
Also, since there's hydrocarbons on Titan and ice in the rings and moons of Saturn, I think Clarke picked the wrong gas giant to send his characters to! Saturn's got it going on.
This is not a sig
The spacecraft is flying 200 km from the south pole of Enceladus. The plume extends *thousands* of kilometers into space. We're not passing through the top of the plume by any means. We're getting right into it.
You all keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
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I don't think NASA would put Cassini into any significant danger, considering that the probe is still doing a lot of good work. But think of the science being done here! This is why we should be putting more money into our robotic missions. We don't even need to qualify them by saying they can do some things more efficiently than humans, they can do things right NOW that we meatbags have no chance of doing for at LEAST another century!
Any time any maneuver like this is considered, there's a study group assembled to examine the risks. As some articles are mentioning, a 25-km flyby was considered, but was deemed a little too risky after looking at the studies.
If you can't find life, put it there! Seriously though, if the algae could live and inhabit the place, it would be a step toward proving terra-forming even it it did "pollute" the thing. It's not like there's a magic bullet to prevent pollution in the future anyway. Your bound to get cross planetary pollution if/when we get to mass travel in space.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Any chances in the future that NASA will try a Star Dust mission to retrieve some of this water? ( http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stardust/main/index.html/ )
It would be interesting to see if there are anything of interest (say bacteria) in the water. I believe it is pretty hard to find any water source on earth that doesn't contain anything "alive".
The Cassini is plutonium powered so hopefully it does not crash and piss of ETs with the sort of scenario depicted here in this crack-pot attempt to stop the Cassini launch back in '97. http://www.junkscience.com/news/broad.html
And thats no geyser either...
You'll piss it off.
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The video on the JPL site explains that at the altitude at which they're passing through the plume, the only particles are micron-sized and don't threaten the craft at all. Larger particles can't get up that high.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
If this image is any indication, then it pretty much is the top of the plume.
Well that's cool, but more importantly, will NASA be offering the same sort of media of the actual event?
I have to imagine those pictures would be much more interesting.
It's not. The plumes extend well beyond 1000 km. And you'll notice that we cut through a much brighter (hence denser) part of the plume before passing under the moon as well.
...welcome our soggy robotic pinball-moon-wizard overlord.
Table-ized A.I.
the enigmatic ice moon Enceladus, whose surprising giant water geysers hint at a hidden ocean of liquid water.
Damn, I keep mixing them up. I thought Enceladus was the one that was "very noted for its exciting sit coms but ravaged by vicious mountain goats".
sudo ergo sum
>The plume extends *thousands* of kilometers into space
...
Megameters! And other distances relatively unfathomable
NASA's raw Cassini image feed is getting hammered pretty hard at the moment, but there are a few shots here too.
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This is the captain. We have a little problem with our entry sequence, so we may experience some slight turbulence and then - explode.
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You know, I've been valiantly trying to get "megameters" accepted in my discipline, but I'm having little luck. I sort of snapped when I saw someone label a plot in "kilo-kilometers".
Look at the detail of that surface! The crystalline structure that absolutely must be frozen water! There are areas that could be mountains surrounded by flat plains that echo the visions of the frozen worlds of the earliest space artists!
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.