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More from Cassini/Huygens

W

Wabbit

New Member
Some of the newest photographs taken from Cassini! I love this stuff :) I an much more excited about this than the Mars mission! I can't wait till the huygenes probe desends though the hydrocarbon haze into Titan in 2005! The moon should feature oceans, weather and recent observations of the moon from Cassini strongly suggest plate tectonics are going on right now. Titan and Europa are the places we should be looking at. Forget Mars!

Anyway, here are the images. First is Saturn and the other is the moon ( should really call it a planet! ) Titan. The image of Titan represents are huge leap over what has been seen before. It's beautiful and mysterious :)

Saturn
Saturn%7E0.jpg


Titan
aphotojournal.jpl.nasa.gov_jpeg_PIA06081.jpg

BTW, Cassini will fly by Titan in 114 days! October 26th! So expect some great images. It has a polerizing camera to help see though the haze so maybe get some surface details. Good stuff! Can't wait!
 
Ah, yeah, thanks for posting those! :)

The rings are great :)

Very interesting too. The bands have been found to be very different. With one band made of basically water ice and the other rocky/dirty that seems to be composed of material much the same as one of Saturns tiny moons ( can't remember the name right now dammit! )
 
VTChEwbecca said:
I know, the rings are absolutely fascinating. Cool stuff, I can't wait to find out more!
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i like your avatar and the lil kiwiw bird in the quote, there are my fav birds. :)
 
The only problem with the Titan mission is going to be actually landing. If I remember correctly they are still guessing at the surface texture, but do not believe it be either solid or liquid but some sort of gelatinous in between. Should for some great days ahead :) I didn't know you liked astronomy wabbit?!! :)
 
Beautiful picture of the Enoch gap....actually caused by the gravitational force of Pan...one of the satellite moons that Voyager just found some 24 years ago. :D This stuff rules....although Saturn's heating system is the most amazing thing in itself because for all logical purposes it would have thought to have grown much colder long ago! But that's a longer explanation and we'll let some people reply :)
 
True@1stLight said:
The only problem with the Titan mission is going to be actually landing. If I remember correctly they are still guessing at the surface texture, but do not believe it be either solid or liquid but some sort of gelatinous in between. Should for some great days ahead :) I didn't know you liked astronomy wabbit?!! :)
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Yup, very interested! :)

Well, Cassini is not landing itself but will continue its travel though the Saturn system swinging by various moons and taking close looks at Satun with its many instruments. When Cassini swings close by Titan in 2005 it will release the ESA's Huygens probe that will decend to Titan.

It's believed that the suface of Titan is solid but very probably has lakes/ocean of ethane and maybe methane on it's surface. The lakes/oceans would have HUGE waves! Seven times lager than we find on earth and travling very very slowly across the surface. There could also be snow of ethane and methane. Very interesting place and of course this place is pretty much what Earth was like in it's early stages of exisitance. Titan has all the building blocks of life there.

I really think this is much better mission that the Mars mission. I mean, we pretty much KNOW already that Mars has a water past. recenlty it was found that it used to rain on Mars. No lander needed for this and of course the ESA's Mars Express in orbit is giving all kinds of great results about the exisitence of water. HMMMMMM, why is it we never hear about Mars Express so much???? It's a good mission! The rover mission is very unimaginative and very unambitious. Why not have a life detection equipment? The argument has NOT be settled. They could be doing so much. Mars rovers smell more of PR for N.A.S.A rather than anything.

Having said that, I have been following the Mars rovers with much interest :)

I wish they would go to Europa! I would love a probe to be able to go beyond the ice and down into the ocean that is believed to be under it. The evidence for the salty! ocean is very compelling.

Anyway, good stuff from Cassini. Can't wait for more details to come in from it. Should be lots of interesting stuff in the years to come!
 
lahondas said:
i like your avatar and the lil kiwiw bird in the quote, there are my fav birds. :)
Click to expand...

Thank you :) I'm more of a chickadee person, myself, but I thought the little bird was cute, so I put it in my sig.



Wabbit -> I think NASA needs a good PR mission to get more funding so that they can tackle more ambitious projects. Unfortunately, space missions haven't really been even close to a priority in many, many years. If deemed successful, the Mars mission may bring in more $ to use in further research. I also think, for the general public, that Mars holds great interest because of all the stories involving humans living on Mars.

Personally, I find the Cassini mission far more interesting, but I find Saturn and its moons to be highly interesting.
 
I agree :)

But, im disappointed that Bush is choosing to focus all of NASA's budget on Mars. It's all pre-election hype and will take away a lot of funding from other stuff that is needed.

I think NASA has a lot of problems. I have my hopes on the ESA, China and private U.S enterprise for interesting new stuff in the next 10 - 20 years.

As for inspiration. What about SpaceShipOne?!!! WOW, that is fantastic! I think of all the kids glued to the T.V screen out there. All those minds filled with space and a few of them are gonna grow up and do great things and say they remember as a kid watching SpaceShipOne reach for the stars! Shows you how crap the media is that they have not covered SpaceShipOne or the X prize at all. In the papers and on T.V it has been relegated to minor interest spot. The media is a joke. It's not news, but it's entertainment in the guise of news!
 
Except for Popular Science. They think Burt Rutan's run for the X Prize is the best thing since the invention of the wheel.
 
The X prize is cool, but I think most kids are glued to the crap on tv, not the cool stuff. My husband and I've been keeping up with the X prize via the internet, not the media.
 
Yeah, most of them are glued to the crap, but it's that 10 percent that will grow up inspired that matter. It's all worth while :)
 
No, not much here either :(

As I said, the media is simply entertainment. Fear mongering, murder and terror sell more. It's as simple as that. On the day that SpaceShipOne flew, I picked up a paper that was laying on a train seat. The frount page contained foodball and something to do with some celeb's sex life. It was not till page 8 that they covered the X price.

How sad.
 
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