Which is exactly what this map is for: geologic analysis, not navigation. As far as it being out of date, the most recent spacecraft data we have is from the 2007 New Horizons flyby, and while it did show changes since the last of the Galileo data from 2001, it wasn't so much as to be unrecognizable, just as the first Galileo images of Io from 1996 didn't reveal a surface that was tremendously different from that seen in the 1979 Voyager data.
Besides, while there been some major new flows seen since Galileo (this map does not incorporate New Horizons data), like at Masubi and North Lerna Regio, most of the changes at a global scale are from transient diffuse deposits (fallout from volcanic plumes), which are shown in a supplemental map to the geologic map. No new mountains or volcanic depressions have been seen.
Unfortunately, it will be 15 years or more before we get new data to update this map... Likely more since the Jupiter Europa Orbiter is being scaled down, enough to eliminate science during any Io flybys.
The graphics capabilities of both the iPad (2nd and 3rd gen) and Tegra 3 tablets are more than capable of playing high quality games. At the very least, direct ports from the last console generation (like GTA III and The Bard's Tale) run just fine on both types of tablet devices. The problem is not the GPU of either Apple or Google's tablets. The problem is money -- how much money are developers willing to spend on producing a game where the max selling price is ~$10 (I've only seen >$15 on the Final Fantasy ports). This limits the scope of mobile games on either OS to either pretty tech demos (like Infinity Blade), games designed to the lowest common device (think Gameloft's games), cheaply designed casual games that don't push the GPU in the slightest (Angry Birds, Jetpack Joyride), or ports of older games (FF Tactics, GTA III, The Bard's Tale).
Don't get me wrong, I love gaming on my iPad (or at least I like it enough to have no desire to get a PS Vita), but there are few games that truly push the GPU because there is just no money in it to do so. Until people are willing to pay $30-40 for a top-notch game on their mobile device, we won't.
and before someone says that touchscreens are another factor, please, that's only a problem with ports (or developers who think touchscreen games are just like console or handheld games without thinking (*cough*EA sports*cough*). Fighting games that require you to hit a bunch of virtual buttons are wretched on a touch screen device. fighting games like Infinity Blade are pretty fun because they take advantage of the touch screen, rather than treat the screen like a virtual controller. I actually did like GTA III, but I often had to find alternative ways to complete missions because running and gunning was more difficult than using the sniper rifle.
Re:Tablet... Is Not An Ebook Reader...
on
The eBook Backlash
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· Score: 1
Umm, okay. So I should just stop now? Despite the fact that the last eight books I've read (including The Stand which I've am working through now) were on iBooks or the Kindle reader app... True, reading on a tablet may not be for everyone, but since it is the one device that is almost guaranteed to be on my person (except for when I go shopping...), I think I will just stick with that...
The problem is that is a planetarium app. There are plenty of those in the app store. I particularly like SkySafari Pro. It's expensive but excellent. No, what I want is Celestia, which I use more to see what Cassini is up to at any given time, since I have Celestia set up on my desktop to show its position and its orientation (from knowledge of where the instruments are on the spacecraft, you can then see where the cameras are pointed at any given time). Putting yourself at Cassini's position also gives you an interactive way of looking how far away Saturn or Titan are at any given moment.
I've had LibreOffice installed on my laptop ever since I bought it last year. I typically use MS Office but I really didn't feel like paying for yet ANOTHER licence of it in addition to the one on my desktop. LibreOffice has been pretty solid for me over this past year, though I wish it had better support for DOCX...
We can't make reliable weather forecasts for Titan either... But at least we have an excuse, we've only observed Titan's weather patterns from the Titan equivalent of mid-December (when Earth-based observations of sufficient resolution began in 2002) to the equivalent of early- to mid-April (where we are now). And even then the data set (even from Cassini) is pretty sporadic.
But I do have one reliable way of knowing when there won't be clouds on Titan. Acquire images of it with an observation with the word "CLOUD" in it, like ISS_147TI_CLOUD002_PRIME
From the majority of iPod touch and iPhone users, this is a relatively minor update (unless you have an Apple TV), and clearly the OP is writing about the update from that perspective.
Sorry, this was a bit of an inside joke. I am a planetary geologist, so yes, it is pretty interesting when we can add another large impact basin to the ones we can study right here on Earth.
The joke comes from the first time I went on a field trip to Meteor Crater east of Flagstaff, Arizona. Because I've done some work on the eroded impact craters of Titan, all I said was "Meh, I've seen bigger" because all the crater on Titan are bigger than the mile-wide Barringer crater.
It also affects proposals to NASA that have ANY international collaborators. When sending out various drafts, we have either ITAR-safe or ITAR-unsafe versions because foreign citizens not working in the US are not allowed to even read vague descriptions of hardware, let alone have the hardware. So for the ITAR-safe version, whole sections of the proposal have to be removed for the safety of our foreign collaborators. After all, if you know how to build a [redacted for your safety], you must be a terrorist...
When does it snow on Titan? Rain, yes. Lots of Rain, sure. A gentle drizzle from the stratosphere, why not? But, nope, no snow... not cold enough for methane or ethane to fall as snow on Titan, even at the winter pole.
Definitely a good time to check out Jupiter and the four Galilean moons before conjunction which happens in the next couple of months, so Jupiter would then be too close to the Sun.
A minor quibble with the summary above. On January 7, 1610, Galileo only recorded 3 "fixed stars" next to Jupiter. Two of the Galilean moons, Io and Europa, were too close together for Galileo to separate with his 20x power telescope. He continued to observe three moons at most, either because one or more moons were too close to Jupiter and were lost in the glare of the planet, Callisto was too far from Jupiter and was thus out of his telescope's field-of-view, or two of the moons were too close together, during subsequent nights, until January 13, when he was able to see all four for the first time.
Wikipedia is wrong on one point. True, his first observation of all four moon at once didn't come until January 13 and he didn't realize that there were four and not three until that time, but that doesn't mean that one moon's discovery (in Wikipedia's case, Ganymede) should be attributed to that date. By that point, he had observed all four on multiple occasions, just not all four at once. And to that point he hadn't even come to the conclusion that they were in orbit around Jupiter with their own separate orbits, moving a different speeds, until two days later, let alone ascribe identities to each of the stars he saw, connecting one star he saw with another from a different day, beyond the one to the east, the one to the west, and the one in the middle.
A 7-meter wide asteroid isn't very big and would almost certainly explode high up in the atmosphere, causing no damage on the ground, except for random meteorites that reach the ground. For that sized object, I would paint a bull's eye on my roof so I would get to see a nice show.
I seem to recall a large world nearby with plentiful water supplies that could be shipped in...
It isn't as if lunar settlers would completely cut off from supplies from Earth, the Moon isn't THAT far away. Add that with even a half-decent water recycling system, and water shouldn't be a problem.
CC, don't worry too much about the self-advertisement. If you find something cool, and you think people here might be interested, it never hurts to submit the story. For example, I submitted the story about the Titan playas, though it wasn't approved, probably because I submitted it to the wrong place.
Does he really want people to answer that? His card says that he's a douche and is full of himself. His card says that he wasted 25 years of his life working on an effective business card, rather than doing something productive, like watching grass grow. His card says that he has too much money and should be personally taxed more. His card says that he doesn't care about the earth because of all the 4 dollar, nice card stock business cards that will be thrown out after people mutter, "what a douche," after he hands him that (or they just file the info in some sort of electronic address book thingie.
An orbiter is needed before you send a lander for a few reasons. First, our global map of Europa is pretty rough, with only 13% of Europa was imaged at resolutions better than 1 kilometer. That is not good enough if you want to find a good spot to land on. While Europa may have a reputation for having the smoothest surface in the solar system, at the meter-decameter scales (on the size order of a lander), Europa is quite rough, with tectonics grooves criss-crossing the surface and no erosion to wear these features down. So high resolution imaging is need to find relatively smooth areas where it would be safe to land (global coverage at pixel scales of 100 meters is planned for the Jupiter Europa Orbiter with 1-10% coverage at 10 meters per pixel of targets of particular interest).
Secondly, an orbiter is needed to determine the thickness of the ice shell, which is important if you want to access the ocean. Designing a mission that needs to dig down through 2-5 km of ice is quite a bit different than digging through 20-30km. Plus, an orbiter might be able to find areas where the shell is thinner, further helping later lander developers pick a landing site.
Both the Europa and Titan mission would be very exciting missions. The Titan mission is a bit more ambitious though, with a NASA-built Titan orbiter that would map the surface at 50 meters per pixel (so not quite Google Earth resolution, but enough to define the major geologic processes that take place on Titan) and an Europe-built hot-air balloon and lander. The latter would land in the largest expanse of open liquid (methane instead of water) known outside of Earth.
The Europa mission is a bit more tame by comparison, but has a lot more technological development to back it up (which would help it come in somewhere close to its original budget). There are two orbiters. The NASA-built orbiter would explore the inner two large moons of Jupiter: Io and Europa; while the ESA-built orbiter would explore the outer two large satellites: Ganymede and Callisto. Unlike the Titan mission, no landers are planned with this mission, but the instruments on-board both spacecraft would allow it to provide more detailed global mapping of Europa and Ganymede than the Titan mission, which as mentioned before would only provide 50-m per pixel global mapping with selected areas at higher resolution imaged by the balloon (which would be limited to a relatively narrow latitude band since Titan's winds are mostly east-west).
The NASA-JPL website has a page with more detailed documents outlining the mission plans for each moon: http://opfm.jpl.nasa.gov/library/
Re:We already know the outcome...
on
Fly Me To Which Moon?
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· Score: 4, Informative
Except...the Europa mission doesn't have a lander. It only has two orbiters, one would go to Europa and the other would go to Ganymede.
Slashdot Mirror
I know the misspelling is in TFA, but the scientist quoted is Fran Bagenal, not Fran Bagenela.
Which is exactly what this map is for: geologic analysis, not navigation. As far as it being out of date, the most recent spacecraft data we have is from the 2007 New Horizons flyby, and while it did show changes since the last of the Galileo data from 2001, it wasn't so much as to be unrecognizable, just as the first Galileo images of Io from 1996 didn't reveal a surface that was tremendously different from that seen in the 1979 Voyager data. Besides, while there been some major new flows seen since Galileo (this map does not incorporate New Horizons data), like at Masubi and North Lerna Regio, most of the changes at a global scale are from transient diffuse deposits (fallout from volcanic plumes), which are shown in a supplemental map to the geologic map. No new mountains or volcanic depressions have been seen. Unfortunately, it will be 15 years or more before we get new data to update this map... Likely more since the Jupiter Europa Orbiter is being scaled down, enough to eliminate science during any Io flybys.
Don't get me wrong, I love gaming on my iPad (or at least I like it enough to have no desire to get a PS Vita), but there are few games that truly push the GPU because there is just no money in it to do so. Until people are willing to pay $30-40 for a top-notch game on their mobile device, we won't.
and before someone says that touchscreens are another factor, please, that's only a problem with ports (or developers who think touchscreen games are just like console or handheld games without thinking (*cough*EA sports*cough*). Fighting games that require you to hit a bunch of virtual buttons are wretched on a touch screen device. fighting games like Infinity Blade are pretty fun because they take advantage of the touch screen, rather than treat the screen like a virtual controller. I actually did like GTA III, but I often had to find alternative ways to complete missions because running and gunning was more difficult than using the sniper rifle.
Umm, okay. So I should just stop now? Despite the fact that the last eight books I've read (including The Stand which I've am working through now) were on iBooks or the Kindle reader app... True, reading on a tablet may not be for everyone, but since it is the one device that is almost guaranteed to be on my person (except for when I go shopping...), I think I will just stick with that...
The problem is that is a planetarium app. There are plenty of those in the app store. I particularly like SkySafari Pro. It's expensive but excellent. No, what I want is Celestia, which I use more to see what Cassini is up to at any given time, since I have Celestia set up on my desktop to show its position and its orientation (from knowledge of where the instruments are on the spacecraft, you can then see where the cameras are pointed at any given time). Putting yourself at Cassini's position also gives you an interactive way of looking how far away Saturn or Titan are at any given moment.
I'd love to see a port of Celestia on my iPad.
I've had LibreOffice installed on my laptop ever since I bought it last year. I typically use MS Office but I really didn't feel like paying for yet ANOTHER licence of it in addition to the one on my desktop. LibreOffice has been pretty solid for me over this past year, though I wish it had better support for DOCX...
We can't make reliable weather forecasts for Titan either... But at least we have an excuse, we've only observed Titan's weather patterns from the Titan equivalent of mid-December (when Earth-based observations of sufficient resolution began in 2002) to the equivalent of early- to mid-April (where we are now). And even then the data set (even from Cassini) is pretty sporadic. But I do have one reliable way of knowing when there won't be clouds on Titan. Acquire images of it with an observation with the word "CLOUD" in it, like ISS_147TI_CLOUD002_PRIME
From the majority of iPod touch and iPhone users, this is a relatively minor update (unless you have an Apple TV), and clearly the OP is writing about the update from that perspective.
The joke comes from the first time I went on a field trip to Meteor Crater east of Flagstaff, Arizona. Because I've done some work on the eroded impact craters of Titan, all I said was "Meh, I've seen bigger" because all the crater on Titan are bigger than the mile-wide Barringer crater.
Seriously, a 80-160 km crater is not giant. Big, okay, they don't form every day, but there are much bigger craters than that. Like Menrva on Titan.
It also affects proposals to NASA that have ANY international collaborators. When sending out various drafts, we have either ITAR-safe or ITAR-unsafe versions because foreign citizens not working in the US are not allowed to even read vague descriptions of hardware, let alone have the hardware. So for the ITAR-safe version, whole sections of the proposal have to be removed for the safety of our foreign collaborators. After all, if you know how to build a [redacted for your safety], you must be a terrorist...
When does it snow on Titan? Rain, yes. Lots of Rain, sure. A gentle drizzle from the stratosphere, why not? But, nope, no snow... not cold enough for methane or ethane to fall as snow on Titan, even at the winter pole.
A minor quibble with the summary above. On January 7, 1610, Galileo only recorded 3 "fixed stars" next to Jupiter. Two of the Galilean moons, Io and Europa, were too close together for Galileo to separate with his 20x power telescope. He continued to observe three moons at most, either because one or more moons were too close to Jupiter and were lost in the glare of the planet, Callisto was too far from Jupiter and was thus out of his telescope's field-of-view, or two of the moons were too close together, during subsequent nights, until January 13, when he was able to see all four for the first time.
Wikipedia is wrong on one point. True, his first observation of all four moon at once didn't come until January 13 and he didn't realize that there were four and not three until that time, but that doesn't mean that one moon's discovery (in Wikipedia's case, Ganymede) should be attributed to that date. By that point, he had observed all four on multiple occasions, just not all four at once. And to that point he hadn't even come to the conclusion that they were in orbit around Jupiter with their own separate orbits, moving a different speeds, until two days later, let alone ascribe identities to each of the stars he saw, connecting one star he saw with another from a different day, beyond the one to the east, the one to the west, and the one in the middle.
Yes, because us Xbox 360 users are completely incapable of also owning a blu-ray player...yeah...
A 7-meter wide asteroid isn't very big and would almost certainly explode high up in the atmosphere, causing no damage on the ground, except for random meteorites that reach the ground. For that sized object, I would paint a bull's eye on my roof so I would get to see a nice show.
I seem to recall a large world nearby with plentiful water supplies that could be shipped in... It isn't as if lunar settlers would completely cut off from supplies from Earth, the Moon isn't THAT far away. Add that with even a half-decent water recycling system, and water shouldn't be a problem.
Using a US-built instrument. Please leave nationalism out of this...
CC, don't worry too much about the self-advertisement. If you find something cool, and you think people here might be interested, it never hurts to submit the story. For example, I submitted the story about the Titan playas, though it wasn't approved, probably because I submitted it to the wrong place.
No, torrents are a communist plot to destroy Hollywood. Didn't you know that?
Does he really want people to answer that? His card says that he's a douche and is full of himself. His card says that he wasted 25 years of his life working on an effective business card, rather than doing something productive, like watching grass grow. His card says that he has too much money and should be personally taxed more. His card says that he doesn't care about the earth because of all the 4 dollar, nice card stock business cards that will be thrown out after people mutter, "what a douche," after he hands him that (or they just file the info in some sort of electronic address book thingie.
Mars Polar Lander happened. If you actually want to perform comprehensive science at these targets, you actually need to spend money.
In other words, you can have two out of three of "faster, better, cheaper", but not all three at the same time.
Secondly, an orbiter is needed to determine the thickness of the ice shell, which is important if you want to access the ocean. Designing a mission that needs to dig down through 2-5 km of ice is quite a bit different than digging through 20-30km. Plus, an orbiter might be able to find areas where the shell is thinner, further helping later lander developers pick a landing site.
The Europa mission is a bit more tame by comparison, but has a lot more technological development to back it up (which would help it come in somewhere close to its original budget). There are two orbiters. The NASA-built orbiter would explore the inner two large moons of Jupiter: Io and Europa; while the ESA-built orbiter would explore the outer two large satellites: Ganymede and Callisto. Unlike the Titan mission, no landers are planned with this mission, but the instruments on-board both spacecraft would allow it to provide more detailed global mapping of Europa and Ganymede than the Titan mission, which as mentioned before would only provide 50-m per pixel global mapping with selected areas at higher resolution imaged by the balloon (which would be limited to a relatively narrow latitude band since Titan's winds are mostly east-west).
The NASA-JPL website has a page with more detailed documents outlining the mission plans for each moon: http://opfm.jpl.nasa.gov/library/
Except...the Europa mission doesn't have a lander. It only has two orbiters, one would go to Europa and the other would go to Ganymede.