Re:If we're very, very lucky...
on
Imagining Titan
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The Huygens probe's landing site will be near 10.9 S, 169 E (191 W). (There is uncertainty as to the exact landing site since atmospheric winds that could blow the probe around are not well known.) This is on the side of Titan facing away from Saturn, so there will be no poetic images (or any other kind of image) taken of Saturn by Huygens.
"Both of us ended up losing a few pounds," U.S. astronaut Leroy Chiao said in a news conference from the station on Wednesday. "We looked at it as kind of a challenge, kind of a camping adventure, roughing it I guess."
Didn't Chiao and Sharipov lose more than just a few pounds by being launched into a microgravity environment?
And how do orbiting astro/cosmo-nauts determine their body mass? Seriously....
Most college students don't have kids or mortgages. Many (I'm not sure how many) pay for tuition and rent with their parents' money. Many callege students haven't even thought to put money away for retirement. That means any income those students earn is disposable.
The locations of martian "canals" as reported by Percival Lowell in the early 20th century (and a few others before him) do not line up with the locations of martian channels and valleys as imaged by orbiting spacecraft. The current thinking is that Percy & company were just squinting really hard at their telescopes and linking fuzzy bright and dark patches of the martian surface in their minds.
Incidentally, the polar caps of Mars do have water ice in addition to carbon dioxide ice in the winter.
If you're counting moons outwards from Saturn (or, more precisely, in order of increasing orbital semi-major axis length), Titan is more like the 19th moon (or 15th if 4 recently discovered moons are excluded).
You are correct in saying that journals provide a necessary service by requiring papers be peer reviewed. However, the journals I've interacted with as a peer reviewer don't pay their reviewers, so this process does not obviously inflate these journals' expenses by an extraordinary amount.
There's a proposed mission to the Aitken Basin in the south polar regions of the moon currently under consideration. A friend of mine who works in that group asked a number of people for suggestions of what to name the mission.
One name was preemptively ruled out: South Pole Aitken Mission (SPAM)
Mercury is real hard to observe from Earth-based telescopes since it is so close to the Sun. In the near future, the only way to get higher resolution data is to send the telescopes to Mercury. Even the most fervent remote sensing advocate will have to admit that data quality generally improves with decreasing distance to the target.
Using martian studies as an analogy for mercurian (hermitian?) observations, one can see how spacecraft data provide much more detailed observations over ground-based observations. Earth-based data of Mars obtained during the last opposition last summer (when Mars was closer to Earth than Mercury ever gets) does not compare to spacecraft data in terms of resolution. Earth-based (visible-wavelength) observers of Mars have to content themselves with seeing albedo variations. The geology which caused those albedo variations was largely unknown prior to our sending spacecraft. (Please note that tha "canals" reported by Lowell were likely optical illusions - Lowell's canal maps do not correspond to locations of known martian dry channels.)
Similarly, Earth-based spectroscopic observations of Mars have poor spatial resolutions. I remember one paper from '96 which reported 300 km/pixel resolutions. Two spectrometers currently in orbit around Mars get far better spatialresolution (Thermal Emission Spectrometer gets 3 km/pixel; THEMIS-IR gets 100 m/pixel - although, granted, that's with a low spectral resolution).
Two advantages that Earth-based observations have over spacecraft data are: 1) Earth-based observations are a lot cheaper to obtain and 2) a network of Earth-based observers can look for changes in the target with better time continuity than a singe spacecraft (since the spacecraft may be looking at some other part of the planet).
The true value of a Mercury mission is two-fold. Most obviously, new spacecraft observations will provide geologic context for current ground based observations (Mariner 10 only imaged ~40% of the planet). Additionally, Mercury is considered an end-member planet - a planet that likely formed close to the Sun in the solar nebula from which the solar system formed. As such, understanding how Mercury formed will provide a calibration point for models of solar system formation, which could have implications for formation in other portions of the solar nebula or the early solar system or of other planetary systems.
No, we aren't going to be sending people to Mercury anytime soon, but neither are we going to be sending people to Mars in the near future. (Even Bush's space initiative doesn't plan a Mars landing for at least 20 years - plenty of time to get distracted by other problems.) However, even if people aren't going to those placed, there are still useful things to learn regarding the solar system in which we live.
I've been a teaching assistant for several college freshmen level science classes. I estimate that roughly a third of the students I've taught believed that lunar phases are caused by the Earth's shadow.
Even after explaining how lunar phases are produced, showing diagrams, moving a ball around a light bulb, etc., a lot of those students still got the answer to the question "How are lunar phases produced?" on the final. *sigh*
I'm convinced some people just think science is hard and that they can't understand it, so they just don't try to think critically. I'm tempted to give up on those types and let them get jobs at the nearest burger joint, but they also have the right to vote fellow idiots into office.
You mean like the RIAA educating people about copyright law? Or Microsoft educating elementary school kids about how to worship Bill Gates?
The problem with education programs being run by private corporations is that these groups have a vested interest in promoting themselves at the expense of good education. I'm not saying every corporation would abuse an education program in this way, but some likely would.
Tinfoil-hat types will disbelieve educational programs from public corporations as much as public institutions.
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The Huygens probe's landing site will be near 10.9 S, 169 E (191 W). (There is uncertainty as to the exact landing site since atmospheric winds that could blow the probe around are not well known.) This is on the side of Titan facing away from Saturn, so there will be no poetic images (or any other kind of image) taken of Saturn by Huygens.
Click here for information about the cameras.
"Both of us ended up losing a few pounds," U.S. astronaut Leroy Chiao said in a news conference from the station on Wednesday. "We looked at it as kind of a challenge, kind of a camping adventure, roughing it I guess."
Didn't Chiao and Sharipov lose more than just a few pounds by being launched into a microgravity environment?
And how do orbiting astro/cosmo-nauts determine their body mass? Seriously....
Most college students don't have kids or mortgages. Many (I'm not sure how many) pay for tuition and rent with their parents' money. Many callege students haven't even thought to put money away for retirement. That means any income those students earn is disposable.
The locations of martian "canals" as reported by Percival Lowell in the early 20th century (and a few others before him) do not line up with the locations of martian channels and valleys as imaged by orbiting spacecraft. The current thinking is that Percy & company were just squinting really hard at their telescopes and linking fuzzy bright and dark patches of the martian surface in their minds. Incidentally, the polar caps of Mars do have water ice in addition to carbon dioxide ice in the winter.
If you're counting moons outwards from Saturn (or, more precisely, in order of increasing orbital semi-major axis length), Titan is more like the 19th moon (or 15th if 4 recently discovered moons are excluded).
You are correct in saying that journals provide a necessary service by requiring papers be peer reviewed. However, the journals I've interacted with as a peer reviewer don't pay their reviewers, so this process does not obviously inflate these journals' expenses by an extraordinary amount.
There's a proposed mission to the Aitken Basin in the south polar regions of the moon currently under consideration. A friend of mine who works in that group asked a number of people for suggestions of what to name the mission. One name was preemptively ruled out: South Pole Aitken Mission (SPAM)
Mercury is real hard to observe from Earth-based telescopes since it is so close to the Sun. In the near future, the only way to get higher resolution data is to send the telescopes to Mercury. Even the most fervent remote sensing advocate will have to admit that data quality generally improves with decreasing distance to the target.
Using martian studies as an analogy for mercurian (hermitian?) observations, one can see how spacecraft data provide much more detailed observations over ground-based observations. Earth-based data of Mars obtained during the last opposition last summer (when Mars was closer to Earth than Mercury ever gets) does not compare to spacecraft data in terms of resolution. Earth-based (visible-wavelength) observers of Mars have to content themselves with seeing albedo variations. The geology which caused those albedo variations was largely unknown prior to our sending spacecraft. (Please note that tha "canals" reported by Lowell were likely optical illusions - Lowell's canal maps do not correspond to locations of known martian dry channels.)
Similarly, Earth-based spectroscopic observations of Mars have poor spatial resolutions. I remember one paper from '96 which reported 300 km/pixel resolutions. Two spectrometers currently in orbit around Mars get far better spatialresolution (Thermal Emission Spectrometer gets 3 km/pixel; THEMIS-IR gets 100 m/pixel - although, granted, that's with a low spectral resolution).
Two advantages that Earth-based observations have over spacecraft data are: 1) Earth-based observations are a lot cheaper to obtain and 2) a network of Earth-based observers can look for changes in the target with better time continuity than a singe spacecraft (since the spacecraft may be looking at some other part of the planet).
The true value of a Mercury mission is two-fold. Most obviously, new spacecraft observations will provide geologic context for current ground based observations (Mariner 10 only imaged ~40% of the planet). Additionally, Mercury is considered an end-member planet - a planet that likely formed close to the Sun in the solar nebula from which the solar system formed. As such, understanding how Mercury formed will provide a calibration point for models of solar system formation, which could have implications for formation in other portions of the solar nebula or the early solar system or of other planetary systems.
No, we aren't going to be sending people to Mercury anytime soon, but neither are we going to be sending people to Mars in the near future. (Even Bush's space initiative doesn't plan a Mars landing for at least 20 years - plenty of time to get distracted by other problems.) However, even if people aren't going to those placed, there are still useful things to learn regarding the solar system in which we live.
I've been a teaching assistant for several college freshmen level science classes. I estimate that roughly a third of the students I've taught believed that lunar phases are caused by the Earth's shadow.
Even after explaining how lunar phases are produced, showing diagrams, moving a ball around a light bulb, etc., a lot of those students still got the answer to the question "How are lunar phases produced?" on the final. *sigh*
I'm convinced some people just think science is hard and that they can't understand it, so they just don't try to think critically. I'm tempted to give up on those types and let them get jobs at the nearest burger joint, but they also have the right to vote fellow idiots into office.
You mean like the RIAA educating people about copyright law? Or Microsoft educating elementary school kids about how to worship Bill Gates?
The problem with education programs being run by private corporations is that these groups have a vested interest in promoting themselves at the expense of good education. I'm not saying every corporation would abuse an education program in this way, but some likely would.
Tinfoil-hat types will disbelieve educational programs from public corporations as much as public institutions.