Cassini. Titan countdown!

[Bones]

Has anyone been following the Cassini spacecraft which was launched in 1997 and took 7 years to get to Saturn? This mission is far from over, but on January 14th things will really hot up when humans explore for the first time the moon of another planet. Read below for the ultimate nerd high!


STATUS REPORT: 2004-296                   December 24, 2004
 
Cassini MissionStatus Report
 
The European Space Agency's Huygens probe successfully detached from NASA's Cassini orbiter today to begin a three-week journey to Saturn

[lucindrea]

the onlt thing that has me concerned is that the probe is turned off , and is waiting for a timer to wake it .. meny a failed space craft has plunged into some new area , and was never heard from agin ( beagle )  , but i  would really like to know what it finds , i belive their is a camera onboard , although i dont know what type of lense you would put on somthing that is basicly to be imersed in liquid NO2 ( or at least a fog of it ) , so if all goes well we should get alot of chemical information allong with some other information , but all i really want is a cool picture from the ( or just above ) surface heh.

[Crazy Cooter]

I'm waiting for the pics too.  I love that stuff.  There's been alot of physics type stuff (unified theory etc.) on TV lately.  Einsteins 50th anniversary of his death is coming up in April, so you too can become a PBS junkie.

PBS is a nerds heroin.

[Bones]

It just blows my mind that something built by humans not much bigger than a MAME cabinet has traveled over 2.2 billion miles and is about to touchdown on the moon of another planet in the quest for exploration and knowledge.

It must be so tough for the team of people who spend ten years of their life designing/building a project like this, then have to wait over 7 years for the journey to be completed only to find out their little space craft hit the snooze button and decided not to wake up. 

But, here is hoping for success and that the little probe finds something that re-writes the science books yet again. Personally, if this little guy samples anything in the atmosphere that resembles the basic building blocks for amino acids I will be delighted as this will go a long way to prove that what happened on earth is special, but not really unique........

[lucindrea]

Titan's atmosphere is mostly nitrogen , but also methane , ethane and possably amonia,    at -180C ( -356F ) basicly all of that is liquid ,  concidering that the air we breathe is about 80% nitrogen , and methane is one of the basic building blocks of life , toss in massive plate tontonic movements due to saturns gravity ( i.e , underground heat )  toss in some sulfur and phosphorus ( plate tectonics make this probable ) and hydrogen ( not like thats hard to fin in the universe ) and the possability of life or at least basic protiens is highlty possable.

carbon is the wild card , it's needed for any sort of life and it's not found all that often. But you also have to concider that this solor system ( and most likely a few dozen around us ) all came from the same nova "cloud" and in all probably all have basicly the same elements , us , venus , and mars just sit right where the heaver eleiments would of drifted in twords the sun and not be blown away when it ignighted , hance the gass giants farther out , the the moons of the gass giants are pieces of "other stuff" thats been floating around the area ( ok , a very large area ) and got caught in orbit then formed the moons ... at least thats what all the current theories say.
So finding all the same elements in all the local planets/moons wouldnt suprise me much , even in the next few systems over.

oh ya , it' common for biologests to dump all the basic elements in a sealed jar , add electricty , heat and time , and sooner or later , the basic parts of protiens will form , of course no one has left a jar like that for 4billion years , so we really dont know if anything would come of those protine parts.

[Bones]

All makes good sense. Current theory on planet formation kinda comes apart at the seams when they start finding Giant gas planets that dwarf Jupiter

[lucindrea]

jupiter is just a stones throw in mass from becoming a star in it's self ( smash jupiter , neptune and saturn togher and you may get fussion ), and if you concider that a solo star as ours is acctully NOT the norm , the next logical step is to think those giant gass giants around other stars are binariy systems that just didnt get the umph! needed to ignight the second body.

i do belive that as telescopes get better and we get better at sorting out the data from them , we will start to see more and more rocky planets in close orbit around alot more stars ... just the fact that any large body tends to have at least one satalight (moon) then i wouldnt be suprized to see at least one planet around each star.

the thing that allways blows me away is the fact ( according to Einstine ) the more mass is around , the slower time moves , and the faster somthing goes the slower time goes , so these massive starts that are spinning wildly or are moving around in the arm of another galaxy are acctully running at a compleatly differnt time then us ( just an FYI , gps satalights need to be re-calibrated several times daily because of the fact that they move at 17kmiles / hr ) so from our point of view , those massive gass giants are just sitting their , from their point of view , they could form into somthing compleatly differnt in the few years ( to them ) that they would watch our system form then burn out.

[Bones]

In the next 24 hours are huge. History in the making.

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/events/huygensDescent/index.cfm
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/SEMXYGQ3K3E_0.html

Will it crash and burn or will it land on the strangest environment humans have ever seen?
This is stiffy material. 

[lucindrea]

just as long as the thing doesnt do somthing dumb like the metric/english thing or the gravity sensor installed backwards then it should be fine

me and one of the guys at work were talking about the methane in the air ... if you think about it , earth is 18% O2 and titian is 80% methane , now in order to make a fire you need 3 things , fuel , heat , O2 ..   when you light a bic on earth the spark is the heat , the O2 comes from the air , and the fuel is the butane ... now if you took that same bic and filled it with O2 , then goto titan , the heat is the spark , the fuel is the methane and the O2 in this case comes from the lighter .. it would act just like a lighter acts like on earth.

hmm , 10hours or so before nasa starts to recive anything from cassini ... and i would guess 12 or so before they even say if they are happy with what they get back , by this time tommrow their should be at least 1 "press release" picture.

[Bones]

This news is pretty hot and a long time in the making. There will be years to study the results. For this reason I am hopeful of several pics being posted and in a much shorter time than 24 hours. They are expecting 500Mb of data.

The Europeans have made some blunders in the past when it comes to their spacecraft, it will be disappointing if this one also doesn't go as planned. Titan will then keep its secrets for at least another 10 years.

Even if it does touch down and transmit, I am wondering just how much light from such a far away star actually penetrates through all those clouds and atmosphere in order to light the surface.

I would imagine it would be a dim place to hang out. Maybe all the pictures will appear

[Bones]

14 January 2005
ESA PR 03-2005. Today, after its seven-year journey through the Solar System on board the Cassini spacecraft, ESA

[Hoagie_one]

From teh surface of Titan
pretty cool

[lucindrea]

like i said before , they  let out the "press" images and are looking at the rest

their are 350+ images yet to process , this of course doesnt even cover all the other instauments used for gass readings etc ...

also of note , it's a wet place ( ok it's wet methane ) , this is the first time we have landed on somthing wet and not a desert ( we have landed on both cold and hot deserts )

offical images here
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/

[Bones]

I understand.

I don't care if they are just basic unprocessed "press" images. I just wanted to see something to wet the appetite and that's exactly what has been shown.

[Bones]

WOW!

[lucindrea]

heh images like that bug me .. not that they arnt cool , more like i know thats a 360' view and i cant wrap my head around it. hehe

[lucindrea]

they got a color view up , i hope the havent bent to the media like they do with mars ( mars is closer to brown than red ) their missing the little r/g/y/b/bw color wheel used on other probes , or they just arnt showing it

intresting article http://www.goroadachi.com/etemenanki/mars-hiddencolors.htm , i'm just hopeing they not doing the same with titan , the color pic looks very yellow , it's possable thats the true color , but i would like to see a color wheel anyway.

[DYNAGOD]

interesting site lucindrea

[Bones]

Latest image back from the Huygens probe.

[lucindrea]

hmm , she looks like she would be a bit cold hehe

the problem with the mars stuff is that they use infra red/g/b/bw for the images , so no true red data is avilable , no idea what the cameras on the probe use ... and out of the 300+ images , the public only gets access to a few ... this is not to restrict the public , it's because a few scintests spent ALLOT of time and $ to get their bid in to examine the images , so they get first crack at it for a yewar or so ( this is what happens with the hubble also , the raw data goes to the group who requested it , it's up to them to release it )  99& of the time the groups will let the data out once they are finished with it ( and to let other scintests check their work ) but it means a long delay for the public.