Cassini Discovers First River On Another World

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Cassini Discovers First River On Another World

Posted by timothy on Thursday December 13, 2012 @05:36AM from the ok-now-find-some-rafts dept.

AbsoluteXyro writes "NASA's Cassini orbiter, which has been dutifully exploring the Saturn system since 2004, has captured images of the first river ever observed on another world — and it's a biggun. 200 miles of flowing hydrocarbons meandering down a valley in the north polar region of Saturn's moon Titan, emptying into the awesomely named Kraken Mare — itself a body of liquid roughly the size of the Mediterranean Sea back on Earth. But don't think of going for an extraterrestrial skinny dip quite yet, temperatures on Titan average a brutally cold 290 degrees below zero (Fahrenheit)."

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Fahrenheit? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-13 05:40 · Score: 0, Insightful

The reason for reporting temperatures in Fahrenheit is because they have intuitive meaning for us Merkins.
Minus two ninety doesn't fit that description; shoulda been Celsius.
1. Re:Fahrenheit? by uigrad_2000 · 2012-12-13 05:51 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  This is one of the few times that I'd rather see the temperature in the Rankine scale over Fahrenheit!
  Essentially, they had 4 systems to choose from (Kelvin would be ideal), and they picked the very worst choice!
  
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2. Re:Fahrenheit? by omnichad · 2012-12-13 07:35 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  It'll be hard to pry away from us, too. There's more integers between 32 and 212 than between 0 and 100. So if you don't use decimal points, Fahrenheit is of a higher precision. Even still, when you're talking about temperatures never seen on earth, Kelvin or Celsius still make far more sense.
Conspiracy can begin by epSos-de · 2012-12-13 05:43 · Score: 5, Insightful

The white spots on the river banks look like population hot-spots on earth.

Let the conspiracy theorists begin making up stuff.
Surely they will claim something about extra-terrestrial cities and FBI secrets.

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Re:Metric system, please by X0563511 · 2012-12-13 06:01 · Score: 1, Insightful

... are you stupid? Of course they use proper units.
This is a press release intended for the general public.

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Re:How could water be flowing by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-13 06:03 · Score: 5, Insightful

So, instead of reading the article, you decided to search wikipedia instead? That's so messed up....
Slashdot.txt by crypticedge · 2012-12-13 06:43 · Score: 2, Insightful

Awesome science stuff happens, queue 300 posts of retards bitching about the unit of measurement a writer chose to use so the public he writes to can relate easier.
If you have an issue with the measurement don't bitch and moan, do the conversion and move on. That's what those of us raised on the imperial scales do when we see metric stuff posted (unless we were those fortunate to have grown up learning both)
Re:Metric system, please by BotnetZombie · 2012-12-13 10:06 · Score: 4, Insightful

You do realize that there are quite a few integers between 10 and 20, and between 20 and 30, that serve the same distinguishing purpose as your precise splitting into 40-50-60-70-80-90, don't you?