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Sea of oil seen on Titan/DS1 Asteriod fly-by
nsanch writes "The BBC is reporting that there may be an ocean of oil on Titan, the only open sea on a planet (other than Earth) that's in our solar system." And in other news, thanks to Corrado for the pointer over to the Deep Space 1 Mission Log, chuck-full of details from the recent Asteriod Braille fly-by. Amazing how much info you can get at 35,000 Miles per Hour.
All oils are hydrocarbons, however, not all hydrocarbons are oils. This fact is lost on the media who were quick to happily substitute one for the other and log another notch on their sensationalism gun.
Most earth oil deposits are formed from decomposed plant and other biologocal matter. Taking the wrong assumption that HCs == oil and that oil came from life leads one to a totally bogus conclusion.
Titan is an interesting collection of chemicals, but is of zero intrest for possible life. You'd be better off looking for microbes on Mars near the poles or in the more plausible slushy ice water oceans on Europa. (Despite Europa's distance from the sun, Jupiter emits significant heat at close range which is leftover primordial heat from the solar system formation).
So THAT'S what NASA did with all it's old Pentium computers! I'd wondered about that.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Not quite. The American mass media want sex and violence on this planet. The BBC prefers it on other planets (or America).
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Hmmmm... If you -sprayed- oxygen at Titan, you could turn it into a giant rocket.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Yeah, and Alfred E Einstein couldn't even remember his own phone number, yet he was no sloucher! (Not at all.)
Just cause people can't find an ocean on a blank map (like, is that a map on a blank piece of paper or what?), doesn't mean it matters. The fact is no one has used the Atlantic Ocean since 1492! Who needs it?
Besides, we just found a new ocean on Titan, so who can be expected to keep track of these things when they keep changing all the time anyway?
Does anyone else find it interesting and almost slightly irritating that the BBC does a hell of a better job reporting NASA events and stories better than American journalists? It seems that Americans no longer find this type of thing important, which is a pity. No wonder NASA keeps getting their budget cut.
Okay. Get past the title "Oily ocean found on distant moon", and that not-very-compelling image of a probe landing on titan (seen much better on Digital Blashphemy, thanks), and what does the article _really_ say?
Basically, we found that kidney has a dark kidney-shaped feature, and a giant duck that might be rock and ice. The dark kidney-shaped feature might be some kind of liquid hydrocarbon, or maybe some kind of organic solid, or maybe just black rocks. The scientists quoted didn't draw any definate conclusions, and the real breakthrough was just getting a "quantitative map" of the surface.
I find this to be interesting on its own, without the premature declaration that there's a huge sea of oil on Titan.
What I also find interesting is that the pictures from the ground-based telescopes were clearer than those of the Hubble.
The enemies of Democracy are
TANKER HIT BY METEROITE
Tranquility Base (IP) The interplanetary oil taker
Nostromo, on a routine run from Titan to the Hexagon
Corporation Earth ports was struck by a large meteroite
at 013588 hours yesterday, leaving the craft crippled
and leaking an estimated 130,000 gallons per hour into
the L5 space preserve quadrilateral. "This is the worst
intra-luna disaster we have ever seen" said Lgarth Mrubbl3,
spokesbeing for the Committee for the Preservation of Clean
Space (CPCS). "We have repeatedly recommended the use
of cleaner, more powerful nuclear fuels, but nooooo! We
have to truck it in from foreign colonies". Hexagon Corporation
officials, in what is widely reguarded as merely a public
relations move, have already dispatched an emergency
crew to deal with the disaster, but industry insiders
beleive that their ability to suck up large blobs of the
floating Titan #4 Crude are extremely limited, and expect
vast clouds of the sticky substance to orbit the Earth and
disrupt space travel for years until it is finally dispersed
by the solar wind.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Or at least a whole bunch of highly radioactive oil that NOBODY would be able to use for hundreds of thousands of years. What a way to keep the 'other guy' from getting at it.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Stories like that are great. They should aspire to be onion-type stuff.
Who actually reads segfault? I went there a few times, but the quality is a bit lacking. Here on slashdot, there is a method of getting a lot of people to read the cream, if only enough moderators like it.
Observe that this story was sent to level 5 and will therefore be seen by many.
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Yup. NASA has subscribed to the theory "If at first you don't succeed, lower your expectations." Now they plan a high-stakes mission and then sit back and say "If it fails, what can we accomplish anyway? OK, THAT'S what we'll say our goal is." I was flabbergasted when it hit me that once you cut through all the PR, the stated goal of the Mars Explorer project was "Shoot a package at Mars and hit it." We did that and more in the 70s. Of course, the project was a resounding success, but if the little Mars Rover had died on impact, they still could have said "The project succeeded because the package landed!"
It was too expensive to operate in that capacity. Remember how often those transports were in refit? It was said that Mars experienced economic depressions every time one of them went in for service.
It would just be a disaster. We'd have to start a colony on Titan, and police it with Battleroids, and then all hell would break loose when the next wandering spacefaring, slave-trading race popped in for a look.
Better to just leave it alone.
MJP
Don't try that "protecting the children" shit you people use to keep the tits and bad words off my TV. --Seanbaby
Here's one paper on the origin of oil. Basically, that hydrocarbons deposits are not biological, and biological traces are from bacteria.
Uh, there was a probe? I have to go back and re-read that because I only read about the Keck reflector in Hawaii being used.
:-D
Oh, ok.. Cassini will drop a probe when it gets there in 2004. That's in the last paragraph. Its a little misleading then that the top of the article shows an artists' impression of a probe making you think that they confirmed 'oil' on the surface when, in reality, they *think* some dark spots on an earth-observatory image might be hydrocarbon seas.
Sheesh. I'm dissapointed. Guess I'll have to scrap my idea for an interplanetary pipeline to bring crude oil to Earth. Had a name picked out for the company and everything, "Titanic Intra-solar Transportation Systems (TITS)".
LOL!
:) )
(I was looking for a MEEPT!!!!!
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Hey there! I got an idea! Let's make an OpenSource sattelite project and send it into space! Wouldn't it be cool if our satellite would actually reach intelligent life "out there" first and they crack our ship open to find a stuffed Tux doll? ;)
"The Beav"
I try to be fu
http://dept.physics.upenn.edu/nine planets/titan.html
--ac
Sounds like a sea of gooified Spinal Tap album jackets to me.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
BTW, the BBC article never used the words "oil" in their article, AFAIK... I have no idea how that was assumed...
If anyone wants to visit an enviroment with oily pools, methane rain and clouds of amonia, just swing by my apartment. I haven't cleaned my bathroom in ages.
--Shoeboy
Man, you have got to start submitting these to segfault or something. These fake new stories are consistently high quality. It's a shame we have to surf the comments in order to see these.
--Shoeboy
I'd like to be
under the sea
In a Saturn's rings beneath the waves
We'd dance and shout,
and sing refrains
until explosive decompression got our brains.
No, it implies that they said hydrocarbons (like methane) and the press went and said, what's a simple word for hydrocarbons that the illiterate readership and relate to... hmmmm... OIL!
SAUDI ARABIA ANNEXES TITAN
"Mine, Mine, All Mine," Vows Gleeful King
DHARAN, SAUDI ARABIA (AP) - In a bold and unprecedented move, an Earth-based nation has laid claim to an entire celestial body. When the BBC reported that astronomers had located a potential "ocean of oil" on Titan, Saturn's largest moon, the government of Saudi Arabia quickly mobilized and annexed the satellite using a highly questionable procedure. Saudi Arabia is an extremely oil-rich country, and most analysts believe that the move by the Saudis serves only to increase their oil reserves.
The United States' reaction to the annexation was swift and negative. "We would advise Saudi Arabia to carefully reconsider their decision," said State Department spokeman James Rubin. "The Chinese attempted to annex the Jovian satellite Europa in 2010: Odyssey Two, and you saw what happened to them. This move is reckless, and may have far-reaching unintended consequences." Similar statements were released by Russia, France, Tahiti, and Swaziland. As of yet, no country has indicated that they will officially recognize Titan as Saudi soil.
The reaction from Titan was equally fervent. "Under no circumstances," stated official satellite spokesbeing Gkklotrff Bdssuirghed, "will the citizens of Titan accept any intrusion by the government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. We have never done anything to you silly Earth-bound two-legged bastards; all we ask is that you pay us the reciprocal courtesy in return." The official Titan News Agency reported that the Titan military was in a state of "high alert."
The Saudi government, however, is downplaying the interplanetary outrage. "What we have done, we have done under the auspices of international law. If the United States, or Swaziland, or whatever, wished to annex Titan, it could have done so long ago," said a government spokeperson. "Waahh, waahh, waahh. You're just jealous because we did it first."
In the meantime, however, Saudi Arabia is preparing its massive space program for an expedition to the distant moon. While the government is closely protecting the identity of the five astronauts that will make the trip in the top-of-the-line Saudi Shazam al-Rocket spacecraft, the Associated Press was able to speak by telephone to one of them. "I'm very pleased to be going," said the astronaut, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "I am confident that Allah will protect us and keep us safe on our way to Titan. Hopefully, when we get there, we'll find 'Allaht' of oil," the astronaut joked.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground