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The Swirling Vortex of Titan
sighted writes "New images from the robotic spacecraft Cassini show the ongoing formation of a massive vortex in the atmosphere of Saturn's planet-sized moon Titan. (See also this animation.) The same moon has recently provided tantalizing hints of an underground ocean as well. Future missions, if any are ever funded, will have plenty to explore."
Maybe theres a trailer park there
Cut taxes, starve the government. Live free or die hard!
ftfy
with each discovery. Would that space exploration were the priority, we could have robots swarming the solar system, including permanent orbiters around the gas giants and landers on the ice worlds.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
Because corporations realize that it is more profitable to make pain pills for old people, and enforce IP on movies than explore new worlds. A wise government opens the ways which private enterprise will follow, collecting taxes on the successful businesses to recapture the costs of exploration, education, and research. However, as long as minting billionaires is our economic priority, neither government, nor private enterprise, will be interested in new worlds, since all the money is here on this old one.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
... a rasenshuriken!
Posting anonymously since anime is too guilty a pleasure for me :P
Cut taxes, starve the government. Live free or die of a priapism!
ftfy
ftfy
Please mod this entire fucking thread offtopic before it engulfs a potentially interesting discussion about Titan.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Well there's your business idea. Why are you waiting on someone else to do it?
I suspect you'll find out the flaws in your idea once you try.
And my positive contribution to a serious thread:
The dipole moment of water, the dipole moment of anything, ammonia for example, is necessary for life
Because life has to have something to work with chemically, a way in, a way that can lead to more complex chemistry.a dipole moment supplies this way in and way up
Therefore, I am voting against life on titan, as a bunch of hydrocarbons with no dipole moment offer no stepping stone to more advanced chemistry
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Note that when I am an old person (and I am not required by the government to spend a portion of my income on pain pills! But that would get us totally off-topic), I will be free to contribute that money to something like space exploration voluntary, oh, heck, sign up for a one-way trip to Mars! ;-)
But, I guess, I am already old enough by now (and lived under too many nominally different governments) not to have high hopes for having a "wise one" anymore any time soon...
Also, "all the money is here on this old one" -- only for your definition of "money", pieces of paper which might or might not buy anything at any given time or location, or, even more current, some trailing zeros in a 64-bit number on a bank computer. If one defines money as something that people are willing to use for exchange, I can see how He3 would work nicely, and there is much more of it up there than down here...
Paul B.
P.S. To two other people who replied -- yes, this is off-topic, but invitation was built right into the summary, in the form of "if any are ever funded" whining. And no, I was not talking about space businesses (though, I'm all for that!), but possible non-profit exploration -- thus, estimated possibility of chip-in funds from individuals to fund equivalent of NASA, not possible business investments! For the record, I did join at a very early stage a risky private start-up operating on the fine edge between science and science fiction, putting my life efforts and possible $$ where my mouth is, thank you! ;-)
P.P.S Why does /. allow for "Overrated" mods on comments which have *not* been positively rated, except for karma-bonus modifier, I have no clue!
But getting a job there is a bitch.
I was hoping this was the name of an awesome new rock opera / concept album.
I wish there were more comments in stories like these. I always get a sense of child-like wonder when I see new things like this and I always find myself wondering how/why/what is going on. With the physics stories, we usually see some experts or at least some clued-in non-arrogant people having discussions that REALLY enlighten me. Stuff like this, not so much. It makes me feel kind of sad.
I wish I knew more about this subject or at least enough to know where to go look. I will probably have to start with cloud formations and vortex mechanics and work my way out from there, but by the time I finally have a general idea, the wonder will be lost... but at least the information will still reside in my brain and I can apply it to Jupiter or somesuch. I am getting too old and the universe is too big for me to do original research on everything. That is the only reason I wish I could live forever. :)
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
The 'Moon' is the name of Earth's satellite. Titan is a satellite of Saturn, not a 'moon'. It's like calling New York 'a London' of the USA because they're both cities. Four legged, milk producing mammals? They're obviously all horses(!)
Pedantic, yes, but I stop reading and look elsewhere for the information whenever I read about 'moons' around other planets. Even the linked NASA article goes on about 'moon'. A perfectly accurate word is already available to describe these natural bodies without resorting to using the name of a specific one. Just because a name is being popularly and regularly misused as a noun doesn't make it valid in information presented as scientific in nature.
'Hoover' (verb), 'google' (verb) etc etc - words exist already. I've pushed my point far enough...
That being said, I look forward to the 'time'/'space' when parallel multiverse fuckery exposes identical duplicates of our solar system. What will we call *that* Earth's satellite?
Nope. I also have no fucking idea.
NASA is due (this month?) to make a final selection between three competing Discovery-class proposals. Among them is the Titan Mare Explorer, the first attempt to put a boat on an extraterrestrial sea. How cool would that be? Good overviews of the proposal are here;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_Mare_Explorer
http://futureplanets.blogspot.com/2011/08/time-and-updates.html
A more detailed description is here;
http://www.kiss.caltech.edu/workshops/titan2010/presentations/aharonson.pdf
Disclosure: If the TiME mission is selected, I am hoping to work on it.
And in the question of space exploration, the questions of how much we discount the welfare in the future, and what the curve of dynamic inconsistency looks like are essential in deciding at what point it is worth while to invest in an expensive project with very long term payoffs.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
I think it is an area of relative calm around the swirling bands...but that's my 2 cents of scientific insight/guessing...
Supreme Granter of Doctor of Obviology Letters ("A FIRM Command of the Obvious")