Slashdot Mirror
Titan Balloon Mission Being Drafted
eldavojohn writes "After Huygens & Cassini corrected our assumptions about Titan (a moon of Saturn), scientists are now debating about their next mission, and one of the choices is the Titan and Saturn System Mission. What makes Titan a good choice? 'Although the atmosphere of Titan is filled with a smoggy orange hydrocarbon haze, it is primarily composed of nitrogen — just like Earth's. In fact, Astrobiologists think Titan's atmosphere may be quite similar to how the Earth's was billions of years ago, before life on our planet generated oxygen.' We also discussed its liquid hydrocarbons earlier this year."
I think they might be in need of some Democracy... American style.
I have several candidates in mind for those ...capable... of piloting a balloon through a poisonous atmosphere into a poison sea.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
... that'd be a hell of a long trip in a balloon and it seems that ya really wouldn't even need the balloon part in space, being no air and all. Maybe put some rockets or somethin' on the basket. I guess you could git the balloon out again once entering Titan's atmosphere but ya know, I just don't geddit!
We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
Maybe we could seed the moon to terraform it. Since we don't have the ability yet to do terraforming like in science fiction, we might be able to put various carbon compounds or other substances to change the concentration of atmospheric compounds to make it more amenable for life.
"...Although the atmosphere of Titan is filled with a smoggy orange hydrocarbon haze..."
Just like L.A. Let's go there.
You can only be young once. But you can always be immature.
Tell our cousins we said hello and to visit Earth, religulous fanatics miss them.
Hey did I miss something I thought it was 2008? Where did you get all the extra zeros? :-D
You might joke around, but many believe that life is everywhere, we just have to open our eyes wide enough to see and understand it, in order to effectively exploit it for industry. Sadly no form of politics will be powerful enough to impose order on predisposed societies of creatures, at whatever perceived stage of evolution they may be in. You may as well try to impose martial law on cockroaches, or dolphins. Good luck with that.
Saturn could have life? Maybe in the future if we start exporting transforming technology there. I'm fairly certain that once we have established ourselves, there won't be any room left for anything else to thrive in its natural habitat.
Consider the fact that we eat/kill millions of chickens a day. How long do you think life on other planets will last if it tastes like chicken? And you know that EVERYTHING either tastes like chicken or it tastes like beef or it tastes like something inedible.
The only hope that ET will have is if he walks upright and can carry stuff (tools, supplies, materials) in our forced labor camps.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
that those really hot women(Sirens if you will) on Titan are just statues.....
Monstar L
Does NASA really think that the people of Titan will believe that the UFO flying over their methane fields was really just a weather balloon!?
Get Dennis Kucinich on the job!
I read the title as "Selective Service being reinstated for mandatory mission to Saturn's moon"
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
And you thought Iraq and Afghanistan were tough postings. Imagine being drafted and sent to Titan!
on Titan that need to be defended.
In biologist Peter Ward's book "LIFE AS WE DO NOT KNOW IT" he holds out the possibility that there might be THREE radically different kinds of life on Titan.
One might be related to, or if we're not careful with contamination, might be the same as our DNA based "CHON" (Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen and Nitrogen) life. They would presumably live on the surface feeding on the hydrocarbons drifting down from the sky; similar to our methanogens or other chemo-trophic bacteria on earth.
Another kind of life might be something a "little" different (but still really unlike anything seen on earth, life that uses AMMONIUM as its working fluid as opposed to our life which uses water. (It would presumably live in the ammonium ocean speculated to beneath the ice) that forms Titan's surface. It's only a "little" different because it would still be basically be CHON life but who knows what its metabolism would run on?
Finally he even mentions the possibility of a SILICON based life (as opposed to our carbon based life). No, unlike the star trek Horta from "Devil in the Dark', it needn't live deep underground. Instead it would life in some of the ethane-methane lakes at the surface (which would be capable of making the silicon soluble and would substitue in for carbon I guess). So all of life's components; fats, sugars, proteins, RNA and DNA would use silicon as a major structural component. Now that's different!
For these admittedly extremely speculative reasons he suggests Titan should be just as high on our priority list of places to visit as Mars. Instead of sending a geologist-paleontologist (as he would to mars) he recommends sending a biochemist to Titan. Anyway if they found even ONE of the three kinds of life there, it would (even if they were just micro-organisms) be an incredible discovery. Of course because of Titan's distance it'll be a long while before we can put a human there, maybe we'll have to wait for A.I.
which has long bacon, long ham and of course the extras go into...
long sausage
Any chance we could delay the Titan mission and instead deploy an infrared telescope to study the asteroid belt? This would not only provide us with valuable scientific knowledge, but would also give us a chance to detect earth-bound asteroids with enough time to perhaps do something about them. My understanding is that Congress has specifically asked NASA to prioritize such a mission, but the directive has mostly been ignored.
This is too bad, since there's a non-trivial chance of a serious impact in the next couple of centuries. Nothing we learn about TItan will do us much good if we're dead.
I thought they brought Hergé back fromt he dead for a second.
Er, what? We've mapped the entire surface, although not all at great resolution. And I'm not remotely clear what she means about the orbit. I know she can't mean that Cassini only passes Titan on equatorial (not ecliptic!) orbits, because that's clearly not the case. Look at the radar swaths taken over the poles, for example.
I wonder if she was mis-quoted.
The balloon aspect is indeed cool, especially since the balloon will communicate by radio with a raft floating in one of Titan's methane/ethane lakes, and an orbiter that will solve some of the mysteries Cassini has revealed. The other mission being studied would explore the Galilean satellites, tackling questions raised by the Galileo orbiter beginning more than a decade ago. Given its abundant tidal heating, possible surface oxidation by solar wind particles (think food), liquid water ocean, and possible hydrothermal systems, Jupiter's moon Europa may be a better target in the search for life. Here are the mission descriptions from NASA, with links to the details: http://opfm.jpl.nasa.gov/europajupitersystemmissionejsm/jupitereuropaorbiter/ http://opfm.jpl.nasa.gov/titansaturnsystemmissiontssm/
"I reviewed your flight plan. Not one error in a million keystrokes. Phenomenal. It's right that someone like you is taking us to Titan."
-- http://ninthagenda.com/
Nevermind the tiny Titan. How much organics are there in Saturn, Uranus and Jupiter?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
An amphibious "boat/rover" is a better option. I want to see what's up with the lakes or puddles there.
cowards are at it again. seriously though why would anyone care?
Why not a lighter than air balloon? A canister of compressed hydrogen gas could fill a balloon. It would eventually leak out but how long would the scientific instruments last? Alternatively a probe sent to analyze the hydrocarbon makeup could precede a craft powered by fuel cells since there is apparently a large hydrocarbon component of the atmosphere. If the atmosphere is dense enough perhaps a fuel cell powered winged aircraft would work.