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Titan Balloon Mission Being Drafted
Posted by
timothy
on Tue Nov 11, 2008 11:18 AM
from the trial-balloon-for-a-trial-balloon dept.
from the trial-balloon-for-a-trial-balloon dept.
eldavojohn writes "After Huygens & Cassini corrected our assumptions about Titan (a moon of Saturn), scientists are now debating about their next mission, and one of the choices is the Titan and Saturn System Mission. What makes Titan a good choice? 'Although the atmosphere of Titan is filled with a smoggy orange hydrocarbon haze, it is primarily composed of nitrogen — just like Earth's. In fact, Astrobiologists think Titan's atmosphere may be quite similar to how the Earth's was billions of years ago, before life on our planet generated oxygen.' We also discussed its liquid hydrocarbons earlier this year."
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Liquid Hydrocarbons and possible life? (Score:5, Funny)
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Democratic (Score:1)
You might joke around, but many believe that life is everywhere, we just have to open our eyes wide enough to see and understand it, in order to effectively exploit it for industry. Sadly no form of politics will be powerful enough to impose order on predisposed societies of creatures, at whatever perceived stage of evolution they may be in. You may as well try to impose martial law on cockroaches, or dolphins. Good luck with that.
Saturn could have life? Maybe in the future if we start exporting transformin
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And you know that EVERYTHING either tastes like chicken or it tastes like beef or it tastes like something inedible.
Hmmmmmmm... chicken... tasty! Can't wait to get a box of good old Titanic Fry Chicken.
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The only hope that ET will have is if he walks upright and can carry stuff (tools, supplies, materials) in our forced labor camps.
What if he walks upright, has more advanced technology and we taste like chicken?
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Not possible. If we tasted like chicken cannibalism would be more common.
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Awesome, now I can finally make a a few bucks selling my relatives to the alien food processing plants!
Er... did I say that out loud?
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OMG we're doomed!!!!
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Actually, we taste like pork.
...
...
...
Or at least so they say [reference.com]
hmmmm...(long) pork (Score:2)
which has long bacon, long ham and of course the extras go into...
long sausage
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Hmmm... knew this Jewish girl with long, dark, curly hair, white skin and large... tracks of land. Tasted more like honey than pork, when you got down to it. A little on the short side though. Is nice when women are tall and curved in all the right places.
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Everybody knows we taste like pigs. That's why in the language of some cannibals, the name for that kind of meat was "long pig".
I guess Homer Simpson was not so wrong after all. :P
About the more advanced technology.... Mmmmmhhh... long pig....! ;)
Re:Democratic (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually... there are many more millions of chickens and cows around because they are delicious than there would be otherwise.
If chickens and cows weren't useful to use we wouldn't raise them by the millions/billions. The animals that are endangered are the ones that are simply in the way of our farms. We cut down the rain forests filled with unknown species in the name of planting corn.
If we did find another habitable planet one of the first things we would do is work on clearing land for crops to grow.
After that once we get enough grazing land under control.... space cows.
Parent
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Re:Democratic (Score:5, Insightful)
This does not justify treating animals like shit because we eat them. But every time some hippy shit points out that stupid hollywood asshole's movie about farms I want to beat their heads in with a cattle prod. I have been around a great number of farms growing up and NONE of them were like that. I have no doubt that there are shitty commercial farms that do behave that way, but it is most certainly not the norm.
Raising animals to be eaten is not even remotely the same thing as animal cruelty. Even come slaughter time most of those animals are treated more humanely than they would be in the wild. We at least give them a quick death. I seriously doubt that pack of wolves cares much about how long it takes the animal to die or how much it suffers while they start tearing its flesh off.
Parent
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2. Those "hollywood assholes" are more practiced liars and to claim what they do is "research" is stretching it pretty far. Anecdotal evidence is weak, but claiming hollywood does research and doesn't make their money by being lying hypocritical assholes is laughable at bes
There might be THREE kinds of life! (Score:5, Interesting)
In biologist Peter Ward's book "LIFE AS WE DO NOT KNOW IT" he holds out the possibility that there might be THREE radically different kinds of life on Titan.
One might be related to, or if we're not careful with contamination, might be the same as our DNA based "CHON" (Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen and Nitrogen) life. They would presumably live on the surface feeding on the hydrocarbons drifting down from the sky; similar to our methanogens or other chemo-trophic bacteria on earth.
Another kind of life might be something a "little" different (but still really unlike anything seen on earth, life that uses AMMONIUM as its working fluid as opposed to our life which uses water. (It would presumably live in the ammonium ocean speculated to beneath the ice) that forms Titan's surface. It's only a "little" different because it would still be basically be CHON life but who knows what its metabolism would run on?
Finally he even mentions the possibility of a SILICON based life (as opposed to our carbon based life). No, unlike the star trek Horta from "Devil in the Dark', it needn't live deep underground. Instead it would life in some of the ethane-methane lakes at the surface (which would be capable of making the silicon soluble and would substitue in for carbon I guess). So all of life's components; fats, sugars, proteins, RNA and DNA would use silicon as a major structural component. Now that's different!
For these admittedly extremely speculative reasons he suggests Titan should be just as high on our priority list of places to visit as Mars. Instead of sending a geologist-paleontologist (as he would to mars) he recommends sending a biochemist to Titan. Anyway if they found even ONE of the three kinds of life there, it would (even if they were just micro-organisms) be an incredible discovery. Of course because of Titan's distance it'll be a long while before we can put a human there, maybe we'll have to wait for A.I.
Parent
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DRILL BABY DRILL!
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SLURP, BABY, SLURP?!!!
Who will man the balloon? (Score:4, Funny)
I have several candidates in mind for those ...capable... of piloting a balloon through a poisonous atmosphere into a poison sea.
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So... (Score:5, Funny)
Terraforming (Score:3, Insightful)
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we might be able to put various carbon compounds or other substances to change the concentration of atmospheric compounds to make it more amenable for life.
The atmosphere is only part of the problem though. Titan's distance from the Sun limits the amount of energy that the moon receives -- the negative 292 degree temperatures (F) would seem to be an issue even if the atmosphere was completely Earth like.
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No, you just have to bundle up before going outside.
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smoggy orange hydrocarbon haze (Score:5, Funny)
Just like L.A. Let's go there.
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Hey, our air quality is a hell of a lot better now. I can't even remember the last time we had a smog alert.
P.S. I like your slashdot login. Shalom!
When the balloon gets there (Score:1)
Billions of years ago.... (Score:1)
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It was the Golden Age of Ballooning.
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Yeah. We all know the Earth is only 6,000 years old
Hopefully they know (Score:2)
It's just a weather balloon. Stop asking questions (Score:2, Funny)
Does NASA really think that the people of Titan will believe that the UFO flying over their methane fields was really just a weather balloon!?
Get Dennis Kucinich on the job!
must slow down on coffee intake. (Score:2)
I read the title as "Selective Service being reinstated for mandatory mission to Saturn's moon"
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Sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity.
Cheers!!
What about the Asteroid Belt? (Score:5, Interesting)
Any chance we could delay the Titan mission and instead deploy an infrared telescope to study the asteroid belt? This would not only provide us with valuable scientific knowledge, but would also give us a chance to detect earth-bound asteroids with enough time to perhaps do something about them. My understanding is that Congress has specifically asked NASA to prioritize such a mission, but the directive has mostly been ignored.
This is too bad, since there's a non-trivial chance of a serious impact in the next couple of centuries. Nothing we learn about TItan will do us much good if we're dead.
Re:What about the Asteroid Belt? (Score:5, Informative)
Asteroid belt objects are unlikely to hit the Earth during the course of the human race's existence. They're in fairly stable, roughly circular orbits that don't cross Earth's orbit. You're more worried about NON-Belt asteroids and, perhaps more so, comets.
In any case, it isn't a zero-sum game: funding Titan research doesn't mean that asteroids don't get studied.
Meanwhile, we *do* have projects to catalog all such asteroids *and* a mission to the asteroid belt in play right now. So what's your complaint?
Parent
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Meanwhile, we *do* have projects to catalog all such asteroids *and* a mission to the asteroid belt in play right now. So what's your complaint?
This: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11356 [newscientist.com]
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Yet contrary to that article, NASA's NEO site claims it's work is well underway and will be completed in a decade. (No mention of needing an ultra-expensive new mission, in fact.) Putting a telescope around Venus sound ridiculously expensive and wasteful. (And rather like yet another reporter at New Scientist was trying to hype a non-story, if you ask me.)
Re:What about the Asteroid Belt? (Score:4, Interesting)
Any chance we could delay the Titan mission and instead deploy an infrared telescope to study the asteroid belt? This would not only provide us with valuable scientific knowledge, but would also give us a chance to detect earth-bound asteroids with enough time to perhaps do something about them. My understanding is that Congress has specifically asked NASA to prioritize such a mission, but the directive has mostly been ignored.
You are asking for several things. The asteroids that may cause problems for the Earth do not reside in the asteroid belt though they may pass through it. Further, a single telescope isn't enough, if you're scanning for dangerous asteroids with an eye to provide advanced warning.
Second, a "serious impact" is not extinction level serious. It might mean a small chance of an end of a city, but those people would have died of something anyway.
Finally, there's plenty of indication that in ten or twenty years, we'll be far better prepared to scan for threatening asteroids. I don't think it's sound policy to throw vast sums at such a modest threat, when a little bit of time will drive those costs down.
Parent
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We should be doing both. Hell we should have missions going on right now to all of the interesting and reachable planets. Cassini cost 3.26 billion. Even at 100 x this the cost is still manageable. So why not send out 100?
Probe, balloons, rovers, subs, do it all!
There is so much to learn that would impact everything we know today. In my view it would be a great investment.
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Wait, What? (Score:2)
Er, what? We've mapped the entire surface, although not all at great resolution. And I'm not remotely clear what she means about the orbit. I know she can't mean that Cassini only p
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Titan vs. Europa (Score:3, Informative)
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The major problem with the Galilean moons, however, is that they liquid is 1 km or more below the surface. That means that anything you see on the surface is an indirect measure of the liquid underneath. They're interesting bodies, but they are harder to study in many respects.
How much gas in the gas giants? (Score:2)
Why a hot air balloon (Score:2)