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Saturn Moon Could Be Hospitable To Life
shmG writes to share that recent imagery from Saturn's moon Enceladus indicate that it may be hospitable to life. "NASA said on Tuesday that a flyby of planet's Enceladus moon showed small jets of water spewing from the southern hemisphere, while infrared mapping of the surface revealed temperatures warmer than previously expected. 'The huge amount of heat pouring out of the tiger stripe fractures may be enough to melt the ice underground,' said John Spencer, a composite infrared spectrometer team member based at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. 'Results like this make Enceladus one of the most exciting places we've found in the solar system.'"
Seriously, NASA. Anybody who's ever eaten at a bad Mexican restaurant knows enchiladas are hospitable to all forms of microscopic life.
The conditions on Enceladus are believed to be short lived. It hasn't been going on for billions of years so complex life forms can not have had time to evolve.
Life could come from elsewhere on comets, meteors, etc but the habitable places are deep inside the moon so they can't be colonized that way.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I told you not to steal my jokes anymore, you hack.
All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landings there.
if we were never sure that it couldn't "be hospitable to life", then nothing has changed.
Is it wrong that I first read "Saturn Moon" as "Sailor Moon"?
Well, while it's easy to say that, it's harder to back it up with flight cash, with research funding for the folks on earth who will plan, research and study the results and oh yeah, you are competing with how many other great ideas to go learn stuff about stuff we don't know about?
There are only so many spaceships that can go up at one time, and while the number is proportional to the funding that the space programs get, it's never going to allow for us to do everything we want.
If you feel very strongly about getting more and more study done, why not petition your local congressmen, ministers and elected officials to spend more on scientific research. Why not look at getting involved and offering your time as a volunteer to do some of the work that could potentially be done by non paid staff. Why not look at getting involved with your local university campus and gather support for a bipartisan effort with other universities to fund a study of something you feel passionate about?
Programmer? Why not offer to write some of the algorithms for them? Scientist? Why not put forward a proposal of what you want to study and why? Businessman? Why not actually offer some level of funding yourself towards a specific research goal? Knuckle-dragger? Why not offer to make make coffees, organize meetings for the others, be a PA to the staff and help out in the cafeteria to bring down costs?
Oh yeah, it's easier to just jump on here and throw out another internet meme.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
I've heard about this over a year ago, at a minimum.
Same goes with Jupiter's moon Europa ( http://www.solarviews.com/eng/europa.htm ). Signs are that it could have liquid water inside, as quoted from the site: "Since liquid water existed in the past, could life have formed and even exist today? The primary ingredients for life are water, heat, and organic compounds obtained from comets and meteorites. Europa has had all three. From the images and data collected by the Galileo spacecraft, scientists believe that a subsurface ocean existed in relative recent history and may still be present beneath the icy surface. Europa's water should have frozen long ago, but warming could be occurring due to the tidal tug of war with Jupiter and neighboring moons."
Same site mentions that the water has been spotted spewing forth from Enceladus in July 14, 2005, being also noted as a "dramatic warm spot centered on the pole that is probably a sign of internal heat leaking out of the icy moon" ( http://www.solarviews.com/eng/enceladus.htm )
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
They probably still have better broadband there than in the US.
Results like this make Enceladus one of the most exciting places we've found in the solar system.
... besides planet Earth.
WTF. This is a moon! Use it for huge stuff that aren't what they seem, but not for actual moons!
OK, I'm done. ;)
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Ask not what the space program can do for you, but what you can do for the space program.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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If habitable worlds, for life as we know it, are more common than once though in our own solar system, does this necessarily imply that other solar systems are more likely to contain such worlds? Or, perhaps, is our solar system somewhat unique in this aspect?
Maybe Paris Hilton goes there!
Where can we donate money to send all of the Democrats and Republicans to this moon?
Just give me a few minutes to pack some things, and we're off!
eleven plus two / twelve plus one
I was beginning to think my Enceladus beach front property might be worthless. I guess for once those spam offers weren't a rip off.
You mean that Arthur C. Clarke screwed up, and it's Enceladus, not Europa, that we're not supposed to land on?!? Damn!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Who cares if life exists or not, I wanna live there!
---
Exobiology Feed @ Feed Distiller
Yeah, it's only showing up again because Cassini made another Enceladus flyby in late 09 and they're just releasing the pictures.
This JPL article gives a better idea of what was new this flyby.
So basically, higher resolution images have allowed them to isolate the heat that they detected earlier (from the 2005 flyby) as a "broad swath" to specifically the cracks in the surface from which water is spewing, confirming their previous hypothesis.
The enemies of Democracy are
It's life Jim but not as we know it, not as we know it! For one thing, these guys are living in a giant ice chest, so they are never at a loss for a place to keep their beer cold!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
2010... the year we find life is possible on saturns? moons. wait wait wait I thought Dave lived on Jupiter.
when can we open up a McDonalds and Best Buy?
Can I bum a sig?
I for one believe we already have enough hospitals. Building them on Saturn would bring no new inherent value.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
NASA article: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/media/cassini-20090624.html :-)
picture: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia06191.html
Video: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/flash/Enceladus/enceladus.html <-- no reading
It'd be awesome to live on a saturn, especially if you have a view of Saturn (how large would it be on the sky?) ... would be pretty dark though, especially if the hot spot is on the south pole.
Btw. it was the Cassini spacecraft that made the flyby.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Non paid staff ? Are you kidding me. Let me know where I can get involved. Every non-paid staff (auxiliary) I try to get into, first not many places are known to accept, second non paid is treated like dirt - as if, we have nothing to do and idiots. I am a programmer and love to spend some time for NASA, JPL etc. Where do I sign up ?
Do they have any job openings?
Yeah how hard can it be, it's not rocket sc... oh wait.
Seriously, I'm all for a new Apollo program but we're talking about an area in which even the leading experts sometimes get it devastatingly wrong with catastrophic results. It's going to take more than a volunteer effort.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Rather than tax the middle class to pay for stuff you care about, but which does not really make a difference in peoples lives. Why don't you just gather in a room with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and fund your own space program?
Studying Saturn is a waste of money at this time even if there is life on Saturn's moon. We should focus on stuff which influences life one earth.
NASA is searching for life in Congress for support of a planetary science budget, so these announcements must be taken with a big dose of sodium chloride.
Back in 1976, NASA flew the twin Viking missions to Mars, each with its own orbiter and stationary lander. All were quite successful. But at what a cost: something close to a cool billion dollars back then; that would be maybe four or five billion today. And there was another cost. To get support for the mission, NASA had to drum up expectations of finding some positive result from the life detection experiments on board and so these experiments took up most of the scientific payload at the expense of the more usual array of geophysical instruments. No life signs were found, the popular press declared a failure, and serious funding for Mars exploration dried up for nearly twenty years.
The more recent NASA probes including Pathfinder, Odyssey, Phoenix, and the twin rovers have all done extremely well and have in total produced far, far more science per dollar than did Viking. These probes have done so in part because the emphasis wasn't on life detection -- iffy at best -- but on good old geology and chemistry experiments that were guaranteed to produce lots of valuable knowledge no matter what.
Could NASA be setting itself up for another Viking-like episode with tales of possible life on Europa and Enceladus? Could life-detection instruments once again shove aside less exciting but more productive geophysical experiments? Since Congress is inhabited mostly by the scientifically illiterate, you can guess how I'll bet.
Keep in mind also that space science funding is about the appearance of science rather than the actual science. Currently, Cassini occupies the Saturn science niche. It may well stay viable through 2017 (according to Wikipedia). That makes it difficult for any other Saturn mission to get funding. Also keep in mind that this is a lot like the planned Europa mission except it would be a touch more difficult (longer travel time, greater distance from Earth, etc). My bet is that we won't see a Enceladus mission for decades (at least until the Europa mission ends, probably after 2027), unless space science changes fundamentally to a much more aggressive mode.
What do I mean by "more aggressive"? For example, suppose instead of building one Europa Jupiter System Mission, we built a bunch and launched them to a number of the ice moons of Jupiter and Saturn. There are perhaps one to two dozen interesting moons to chose from, depending on the performance constraints of the spacecraft and its launch system. If you can land a probe on Europa, it should be able to land probes on most of Saturn's moons. The delta-v of a moon around Saturn is not any worse than the delta-v of landing something on Europa, a fairly large satellite deep within Jupiter's gravity well.
So instead of a single probe which costs $4.5 billion to develop and deploy, we could spend somewhat more to get a number of vehicles (remember development costs only happen once and you get economies of scale when you make and launch a quantity of near identical spacecraft. Various bits of infrastructure, particularly plutonium 238 manufacture and the Deep Space Network, would probably need upgrading. You might need to improve launch infrastructure to handle multiple launches during a launch window. The thing though is that this is a way to vastly reduce the cost of a unit of space science even though you spend somewhat more in the end.
remember development costs only happen once and you get economies of scale when you make and launch a quantity of near identical spacecraft
No. Economies of scale really only kick in to any significant value when you make more than 10 units. And only really kick in when you make more than 100.
All these space probes are hand built. Manufacture costs for two are still about twice the cost of one.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Why do you morons keep thinking that "Enceladus" sounds like "enchilada"? Pronunciation time, shall we?
Enceladus : en-sell-uh-dus
enchilada : en-cha-la-da
No. Economies of scale really only kick in to any significant value when you make more than 10 units. And only really kick in when you make more than 100.
The magic number is two units. That's when economies of scale start. Development costs don't double when you make two.
All these space probes are hand built. Manufacture costs for two are still about twice the cost of one.
That's not true. Hand built doesn't imply absence of economies of scale. In addition to one-time development costs as mentioned above, there's also the cost of assembling the tools and other durable resources you need. For example, I'm helping my brother build his basement. He bought thousands of dollars of tools in addition to the raw materials. If we were building a second basement somewhere, then the cost of those tools could be amortized over two basements instead of just one.
Further, I built some funky hand-made stuff (for high altitude weather balloons) like a carbon fiber balloon nozzle valve, electronics circuit board, or an inflatable strut. You learn a lot from making the first one.
Finally, I think there's a bit more efficiency in the allocation of labor. If you're building more than one spacecraft, then you can keep people busy longer. Further, when you do have delays (say while waiting on materials), the delay usually is not proportional to the number of spacecraft you are building.
The surface shows small jets of water open to atmosphere. There are also closed regions with a higher temperature, possibly due to endothermic reactions.
Enceladus is showing signs of having been colonized by a fairly sedentary life form symbiotic with large populations of other species incapable of manipulating their own environment adequately: Enceladus appears to be breaking out in sewage treatment plants.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Do they have Linux over there?
Have you ever built anything substantial? Multi-million, multi-year dozen engineer project? I have.
You do save a bit on making a few instead of one, but trust me, significant economies of scale don't kick in until you produce more than 10 units. Before that it's only minor savings.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Walmart is already looking at a few proposed locations on Enceladus. The clientele might look a bit strange compared to Earth based customers. Expect to see scores of people in pressed shirts and pants, conservative jewelry, and clean shoes.
All this time, my computer has been pronouncing it wrong!
Dave
Have you ever built anything substantial? Multi-million, multi-year dozen engineer project?
Yes. No, but I did work at an X-Ray film manufacturing plant for a couple of summers and I did volunteer for several years at an aerospace non-profit.
You do save a bit on making a few instead of one, but trust me, significant economies of scale don't kick in until you produce more than 10 units. Before that it's only minor savings.
The thing to keep in mind here is that current spacecraft have very significant development and other one-time costs. For example, the Mars Exploration Rovers cost around 745 million to develop and build two (not counting operations cost which was $75 million through the first 90 days of operations on Mars). The additional cost of the second rover was $250 million including launch costs. That's effectively half the cost of building the first rover. Now building additional rovers probably wouldn't result in significant future drops in marginal cost until you build the sort of quantities you mention, but you should still see significant reductions in average cost from amortizing substantial one-time costs over more units.
That's no moon.
Could look a a planet that is venting water into space around "warm" spots of -100 as "hospitable" to life.
Sure its no vacuum in space, but it sure is hell ain't the forest moon of Endor either.
Let me know when you find care bears and I'll get interested.
Volunteer effort can help though, a lot. Take, for example, the cubeat programs started by Stanford and Cal Poly, SLO. Those two universities teamed up to create a space-rated, spring driven separation system that is compatible with many modern launch systems (though they most often fly on the Dnepr). Creating that launch vehicle interface system has allowed scores of students around the world to develop very small microsats capable of doing anything from taking a picture of the Earth to prototyping technology. For instance, right now, NASA is helping to work on a cubesat mission that will be used as a proof of concept for solar sail technology. The cubesat architecture, a 10 x 10 x 10 cm bus, allows a cheap and simple satellite design that you can pack a lightweight solar sail into and deploy successfully. Then, based on the amount of acceleration and control yielded by this mission, NASA, and any other large organizations that want to, will be able to look at the data gathered by the mission. This data can be used in studies regarding the scaling of the technology and, one day, may contribute to having a viable large scale solar sail technology on the market.
That said, Cubesat programs at universities all over the world are open sourcing space to volunteer programs. I worked on a design concept, for my undergrad senior project, for a small space based telescope that will be constructed out of off the shelf components. It will send picture data down to various ground stations and the data will be uploaded and accessible via a website for all sorts of public schools, all around the world, to access and learn from. Ideally, it will generate an interest in future generations in space. This design is going on, for free, by graduate and undergraduate students at my Alma Mater. This is all volunteer work and it is making a difference
We are nerds. Space has probably filled the dreams of most slashdotters for years. As long as we view rocket science as a big black box of wonder and awe, then only a few elite nerds will have access to rockets. As soon as we do away with that notion (like the open source movement did away with that attitude regarding computers), space access will start getting cheaper, simpler, and easier.
Don't fear the space industry, become a part of it. The original poster to this thread hit it on the head perfectly. Contribute. Only by doing so will our species conquer the heavens above.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Blues Explosion, man!
What? Oh.
Next you'll be telling me that "He's dead, Jim... you get his tricorder, I'll get his wallet!" isn't a direct quote from StarTrek either!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.