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More from Cassini/Huygens

Living in a world where people have no wonder.

There is a great quote from A.C Clark "When we have lost our sense of wonder we are no longer human." I quote from memory so forgive me if there is an error in the quote :)
 
Australias ABC Looks like the first glimpse of Titan is inconclusive, although there are clouds! The article says probably methane rain! Looks like we will have to wait till October when the probe gets closer.
 
Indeed, it is our impulses that make us human. Awe seems to be one of them....when we start resisting them...what's left? :( I, Robot I suppose.
 
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Cassini pierced the haze around Titan, Saturn's biggest moon, revealing details that have shattered theories about its composition. It has atmosphere and soil similar to primordial Earth and may contain the building blocks of life. Scientists believed bright patches on its surface seen earlier were pure water ice. But the first infrared images taken by Cassini revealed water ice as dark patches because it is mixed with material that may be organic, raining on.

A bright cloud of methane particles is apparent in all three images near the south pole. It's persistence over an extensive range of colors indicates that these cloud particles are large compared to the typical haze particles surrounding the planet, suggesting a dynamically active atmosphere near the South Pole. Color was used to enhance the various wavelengths.



WOW! Rain! Soil! Organic compounds? CLouds! How exciting can you get???? Maybe there is even life down there! I know, it's a long short but you have pretty much everthing you need and it's very similar our primordial Earth. All that is different is the lack of energy. Sunlight is much weaker and of course it's much colder there. But who knows, maybe there are vents? Maybe the gravitational pull of Saturn is heating the core of Titin ( as there has been detected on going plate tectonics ). Who knows? Probably not... but who knows :)
 
And there's more! :)

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"Nine days before it entered orbit, Cassini spacecraft captured this exquisite natural color view of Saturn's rings. The images that make up this composition were obtained from Cassini's vantage point beneath the ring plane with the narrow angle camera on June 21, 2004, at a distance of 6.4 million kilometers (4 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 38 kilometers (23 miles) per pixel.
The brightest part of the rings, curving from the upper right to the lower left in the image, is the B ring. Many bands throughout the B ring have a pronounced sandy color. Other color variations across the rings can be seen. Color variations in Saturn's rings have previously been seen in Voyager and Hubble Space Telescope images. Cassini's images show that color variations in the rings are more pronounced in this viewing geometry than they are when seen from Earth.

Saturn's rings are made primarily of water ice. Since pure water ice is white, it is believed that different colors in the rings reflect different amounts of contamination by other materials such as rock or carbon compounds. In conjunction with information from other Cassini instruments, Cassini images will help scientists determine the composition of different parts of Saturn's ring system.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
"

Breathless at the wonder of it all! :)
 
When I was on holiday in Dorset I saw The Plow. it was really intresting, looking up at the stars, wishing, hoping for more luck in my life :eek:

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Thanks for posting this stuff, SillyWabbit! I've been following the Cassini-Huygens progress but haven't checked up on it in the last couple weeks - your thread was a good reminder.

Do you have a telescope?
 
excuse me, I'll only interrupt this thread for a moment, but I've been giving this a lot of thought because today I broke over a thousand posts. I'm sorry for the agony I've caused some of you. I want you all to know that. on behalf of myself and the entire human race (excluding warm_enema), you have my apologies.
 
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