Slashdot Mirror
Lake On Titan Winks From a Billion Kilometers Away
The Bad Astronomer writes "NASA's Cassini spacecraft took an image of Saturn's giant moon Titan earlier this year that serendipitously provides proof of liquid (probably methane) on its surface. The picture shows a glint of reflected sunlight off of a monster lake called Kraken Mare (larger than the Caspian Sea!). Scientists have been getting better and better evidence of liquid methane on Titan, but this is the first direct proof."
Thats what I call it when it doesn't come out as ass gas.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
Its called a terameter. What is the point of the metric system if you don't use the other scales?
lol: You see no door there!
How do they know it's methane, couldn't it be any liquid?
Methane is an organic material. Organics are one of the key building blocks of life. In fact, it is one of many byproducts of life processes. An abundance of organic material bodes well for finding life (probably bacterial) on Titan.
The question is whether life arose there on its own or was seeded by wayward asteroids and comets.
Prior to this, the main evidence that Titan might have liquid methane was based on the reflection of radio waves detected by the Cassini probe. In particular, there were discrepancies between what one would expect and what was observed in the percentage of reflection in the ELF range (about 2 to 30 Hz). This discrepancy suggests some form of boundary layer, such as a boundary between liquid and solid methane or between liquid methane and some other solid substance. There's also a lot of evidence for a large internal methane sea under the solid surface. We still know very little about Titan. We've only sent a single probe (Huygens) actually dedicated to investigating it. However, even Huygens wasn't much and was just a part of the larger Cassini mission. The next scheduled mission is the TSSM (Titan Saturn System Mission) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_Saturn_System_Mission http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=44033) which will focus a lot more on Titan. Hopefully a lot of the mysteries about the moon will then be answered.
Titan is routinely used as an example of a moon that might have life. Unfortunately, if there is any life, it is almost certainly microbial. So no one is appreciating the view from the planet.
The picture, even in "full resolution" is fuzzy. It reminds me of the original Quake logo. Considering that our atmosphere has strange phenomena causing glowing orbs that can be seen from space, I would see this "proof" as suspect.
lol: You see no door there!
"That's no moon!"
If it was possible to mine or drill for oxidizers under the surface of Titan, then you would have a complete energy economy.
Frozen Nitrous Oxide anyone?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
That light is probably just glinting off the statue in Rumfoord's swimming pool.
A sexual harassment suit was filed against the lake by the Isle of Lesbos.
The Kraken! The name of a lake on the moon of Titan, no less.
The Winston Sea, the Niles Sea, or the Rumfoord Sea?
Cue all the little comic book reading fags who'll make up dumb jokes because they couldn't contribute anything insightful to the conversation if their life depended on it.
Is there simply no oxygen for it to ignite? When someone says lake of Methane I think Lake of somethuing really volatile.
We all know it's faked. Those slimy scientists will do anything to guarantee their funding for another year. Last year it was a decoupled lithosphere on Titan, now it's lakes of liquid hydrocarbons? Sure! Next it'll be seasonal rivers of liquid hydrocarbons, jets of water escaping from Enceladus, volcanism on Io, meteorites on Mars, people on the moon, etc., etc., etc. We really need to reign in these people.
The odds for life on Titan are bleak because it is so damned cold. How cold is Titan? Well, when your methane is liquid, as in, liquified natural gas, that's pretty damned cold. The other problem, I think, is a lack of oxygen. I think the basic blocks for life would be nitrogren, oxygen, hydrogen, carbon and I think a splash of sulfur, plus some form of energy. When you really think about it, life is basically a set of chemical reactions that go against the grain of entropy and produce a set of molecules that arrange things in a higher energy state. Like, the outcome of most dead things is to easily burn.
Mercury is big metal blob and way too hot.
Venus has too much carbon.
Earth is nice.
Mars is missing nitrogen.
Jupiter / Saturn / Uranus / Neptune big hydrogen blobs.
Pluto, other deep objects, are near absolute zero.
Maybe Jupiter's moon Europa might luck out.
But honestly, I would bet that if you included some terms in Drake's equation to allow for the probability of having all the elements in the right mix at the right distance from a star, then, it may well turn out that we are certainly alone in at least a 100 light year radius.
This is my sig.
It's called scientific notation. Nobody really uses metric prefixes.
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
"Off of" is terrible english.
it would actually be 1/(10^-12 Diopter) as Diopter is the reciprocal of a focal length to measure optical power
Yes, of course, hence the "minus" sign that the original poster has put in front of the exponent. See :
Lake on Titan Winks from 10^ - 12 Diopters Away
(bolded for better noticing).
All these worlds belong to you.
Except Titan.
Do not attempt to land there.
Oh, wait... wrong planet.
Never mind... carry on, as you were!
You are raising a very interesting question, at least for the average engineer I am :-)
What you are suggesting is, while Schrödinger was dealing with microscopic events (the cat's box was explicitly only an analogy), one may turn it large scale by replacing the request for isolation by a request for distance only.
Now, I'm not sure an actual quantum physicist wouldn't answer you that because of the presence of possible alternate observers, the Huygens module quantum state probably would have to collapse in due time anyway.
In other words: maybe it won't work because of Martians ;-)
H.
Herve S.