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New Close-Ups of Saturn's Geyser Moon
sighted writes "Over the weekend, the robotic spacecraft Cassini buzzed Saturn's moon Enceladus and its intriguing geysers. Cassini flew just 62 miles above the moon's surface — and right through its jets of water vapor and ice — both capturing pictures and 'tasting' the geyser plumes. Cassini makes another pass by Enceladus later this month. Even more pictures can be seen in the stream of raw images sent by the probe."
Wow! That is almost exactly 100km!
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I think living on the moon of one of these gas giants would scare the hell out of me, just for the fact that you look up and pretty much all you would see is Saturn.
What changed their mind was Buzz Aldrin.
I am officially gone from
You couldn't ignore the moon landings, they were as big a deal as the World Series - hell, all three networks pre-empted programming for them. This other stuff is just crazies out in California - you know, they got another group up in Big Sur that thinks they're travelling by Astral Projection too!
Yeah, and a bunch of bozos in Washington DC who think they understand economics.
Crazy talk.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
We could have had a permanently manned moon base for the price of the Iraq war. And th money would of pretty much gone to the same contractors.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
There are also people like me who truly just don't care one way or the other.
Don't get me wrong. I think the whole universe is beautiful, humbling, and awesome. I just leave the exploration to people who have passion for it.
It hardly matters if the data is being falsified to cover up alien interactions. At the end of the day, I still have to deal with the realities of life on the ground, and whatever information I obtain about the truth will never give me an edge to fight the people that are apparently dead set on owning and oppressing me.
That is what the "nutters" and "rational" people tend to overlook. That the whole exercise is meaningless. You are both in a room slowly being deprived of oxygen yelling the top of your lungs about whether there were two apples in the refrigerator, who put them there, and why.
Personally, I am staying quiet over in the corner thinking about the oxygen and how do I solve that problem. Same logic applies to all the divisive arguments in politics and religion, which are all too often mixed.
For the record, the moon landings being faked has some plausibility if you consider geopolitical motivations at the time. If I was in government at the time, I would have been all for faking the moon landings if it meant getting one up on the Commies. It is not about the truth, but about a propaganda war and who is thought to be wielding the biggest stick. From that perspective, the hoax is not only plausible, but a reasonable extrapolation of the situation. If we really could get to the moon, all the better. If we couldn't, fuck it, let's just fake it really really well and make the Soviets look like backwards idiots eating our techno dust.
Either way, it accomplished its purpose. It raised American morale, inspired countless people towards achievement, excellence, and the pursuit of the truth.
Once again, my concerns have always been a lot more domestic.
It would have to be very good. For example, the Hubble space telescope couldn't do it. Not even close. (Despite the fact that it can image galaxies that are billions of light-years away.)
Let's say that seeing an astronaut convincingly requires a resolution of ~5 cm (at that resolution, their hand would be a bit of a blob, but at least you'd be able to tell that it was a person and not a rover...). Let's assume we're using the violet-end of the visible spectrum (wavelength lambda ~ 400 nm). Using the resolution equation:
sin(theta) = 1.22 * lambda/D
theta is the angular difference we're interested in, D is the size of the aperture/optical system, the 1.22 factor can vary a bit between optical schemes but is close enough for our purposes. The distance to the moon is 384,000 km, so the angle theta is arctan(5 cm/384000 km) = 7.5E-9 degrees. So:
D = (1.22 * 400 nm)/( sin(7.5E-9 degrees) ) = 3.7 km
So, we would need an optical telescope with an aperture/mirror that is 3.7 km in diameter. Needless to say, this is quite a bit bigger than any telescope that exists today (the best is about 12 m). If you want to be able to accurately see the astronaut's eyes, to confirm that he's really not a robot, then the telescope would have to be even bigger (like 40 km in diameter).
the phrase (from TFA) "jets emanating from the moon's south polar region" made me giggle.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
It seems to me that the effort to fake the moon landings than it would take to actually land men on the moon. That spacecraft were launched, orbited the moon, then came back to earth seems pretty incontrovertible. Too many independent observers to deny that. The only leg the moon landing conspiracy people seem to have to stand on is the idea that there were no people on the Apollo spacecraft and that landers did not descend to the surface and return. The video footage shot by the Apollo astronauts should put that to rest.
There's no way anyone is going to convince me that Nasa managed to find special effects guys better than any Hollywood has ever managed. Have you seen _Armageddon_? It cost $140,000,000 and featured astronauts walking around on a low gravity extra-terrestrial environment. Despite being a special effects heavy movie, being made about 30 years after Apollo 11, and having a huge budget, they just skipped anything close to an accurate depiction of people moving around in low gravity and vacuum and used some nonsense about gravity simulating jets in the suits (which doesn't explain why the astronauts moving around inside the shuttle were also experiencing what seemed to be normal earth gravity). In fact, no movie I've ever seen has had a depiction of astronauts walking around on a low gravity body in a vacuum anywhere near as realistic as the Apollo footage. To accomplish it in those days, they would have needed to use hidden wires. Look at the best wire based special effects we can manage today. What have we got? _Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon_? Wire effects can be neat, sure, but you can tell they're wire effects. So, if asked to believe either that a bunch of NASA scientists in the late 60's/early 70's managed flawless special effects that no-one can duplicate today (well, maybe with CGI and tremendous attention to detail) or that they sent men to the moon, I'm going to have to go with the less ludicrous proposition. Just to clarify that in case it's not crystal clear, that means I'm going with the proposition that they actually landed people on the moon.
This is a large number but not too large - two telescopes spaced apart at 3.7km and connected to form an interferometer would have the same resolution, but, of course, not the collecting area.
This is still quite a project, but doable and interesting for other purposes. Oh, and you since you were interested in features 5cm in size, you could use radio waves instead of light which would greatly simplify interferometer design.
2001: A Space Odessey came out in 1968 - roughly the same time period as Apollo 11-17 (remember you have to fake them all). It represented the state of the art in special effects. It is no where near as visually arresting as the real on board and on-moon shots. Perhaps in 2011 James Cameron could come close to being visually and physically perfect. In 1968? No way.
Yes, NASA had lots of computers. IBM 360's and 370's with frigging punch cards (I wuz there). The MacPro that I'm typing on now wipes the entire NASA computing system, all eleven buildings, of that period, off the map.
Pics, it happened....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
It is not so clear what the economic advantage of space exploration actually is.
Well, we know it's tangible and significant. We have a lot of commercial and government applications up to geosynchronous orbit. That's current economic advantage. We know there are a variety of substances in space such as precious and platinum group metals that have significant value on Earth. We know people like to travel and they would spend some amount of money to see stuff in space. We can harvest solar energy in space and beam it to places on the Earth.
The point here is not that these activities are profitable, aside from the first group, they are not. But that with just a significant drop in cost, we know we'll have something up there worth doing. There's a big difference between not having anything you can do in space and having stuff that requires a massive drop in cost. It means that there is something to look forward to, if you can pass that hurdle.
What the ultimate economic advantage would be, I don't have a clue. But given there's a lot more stuff, energy, and space in space, I think in the long run we'll see an economy vastly larger by orders of magnitude than Earth alone.
Nothing lasts forever. This you happen to be dead wrong on. The US spends 50% less GDP on infrastructure than any other developed country. Assessments of our infrastructure are alarming and shocking to say the least. We need a major and immediate country wide overhaul of our entire infrastructure. Especially, the bridges. Just look in the news about the recent catastrophic bridge failures where over a hundred people have died.
I'm aware of that. But I'm also aware that spending on infrastructure in the current US political environment almost invariably means spending on new infrastructure, not maintaining the old. That's why there's such a big problem in the first place. More than adequate funds are spent on bridges, they just get spent on building new ones rather than keeping the old ones from falling apart.
And the technology would have been available to the general public to use, unlike military research which mostly disappears into the black hole of the Pentagon archives. I sometimes wonder what avenues of computing, materials science, cryptography, etc. are unavailable to the companies that developed them because the research is now classified and forever off limits. There's still scientific research from WWII that's under wraps.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Apparently it's actually something like 6% of the people in the US. It's just perplexing too. The credulousness required to believe most of the hoaxers theories is incredible.
Try to look at it another way.
If you were not that sophisticated and had average (or below average) intelligence and it was told, or proven, time and time and time again that all the "big", "powerful", and "smart" people, governments, and corporations were lying to you... how much of a leap is it to conclude that they would be lying about somebody/something else?
You mention credibility. Quite frankly, there is not a whole lot of it left in governments, corporations, and other organizations now.
In a way, the smartest thing they are doing is questioning the veracity of what they are being told in their lives. I find it a natural response to our environment that they would seek out conspiracy theory based explanations of why their world sucks as much as it does, when they truly lack the sophistication to do otherwise.
While I do believe we went to the moon, I also believe there is a heck of a lot of corruption, manipulation, and lies from corporations and government institutions that are supposed to be representing The People's interests, but clearly do not.
There are clearly some conspiracies at work, but it does not have to be aliens, ancient groups of men led by occult worship, etc. It is just powerful and greedy people seeking to maintain and increase their power base. That is a far more likely explanation.
It is greatly concerning that the percentage of people like this are increasing, but the only thing to counteract it is education. Specifically critical thinking skills.
Right now we are talking about faked moon landings, but what about California falling off into the Pacific Ocean and creating new beaches in Nevada? If you think it through rationally for just a minute, you will realize the energies and materials involved don't allow for such a radical event and it would affect Japan, China, South America, and large parts of Mexico. Not to mention the Mid-West. The easy immediate answer is akin to Star Trek science.... the aliens have some sort of technology that makes it just happen without affecting the surrounding environment with 10+ earthquakes and 100ft+ tidal waves.
Of course, they also completely ignore that the surface of the Earth simply cannot contain that much energy without releasing it in stages. It's like thinking that can blow up a balloon to 5,000 times its capacity without it exploding. California might disappear beneath the ocean, but it will be on a geological timescale and not within 24 hours, much less 24,000 years.