Cassini-Huygens Reaches Phoebe 178
Anonymous Explorer writes "The Cassini-Huygens
probe is set to fly by the largest outer Saturn moon of Phoebe today. Cassini will be roughly 2000 km from the surface of Phoebe at 1:56 Pacific time Friday, June 11. Thats
pretty darn close. The newest
images of Phoebe are already thousands of times better than the previous ones taken by the Voyager
2 mission in 1981. Phoebe is interesting in that it maintains a retrograde orbit around Saturn. This has lead to the hypothesis that it is an ancient asteroid that has been captured by the gravitational pull from Saturn. Phoebe may provide some important insights into the composition of early building blocks of our planets. Phoebe was discovered in 1898 by American astronomer William
Pickering. As always, discussion about this mission can be found at
#cassini on irc.freenode.net."
More about Phoebe (Score:5, Informative)
Phoebe [wikipedia.org]
Cassini-Huygens [wikipedia.org]
Re:Two objects on the picture (Score:4, Informative)
A little more on Retrograde (Score:5, Informative)
Use Celestia to preview the image quality (Score:5, Informative)
If you want to get an idea of just how high res pictures they're going to get, do the following:
1) Download the program "Celestia". Build and run it.
2) While it is building, pull up the last picture that Cassini took of Phoebe.
3) When Celestia comes up, full screen it.
4) Go into the configuration and tell it to include full details. Exit the configuration menu.
5) Press enter, and type in "Phoebe". Press enter.
6) Press 'g' to go to Phoebe (note: Phoebe is currently false-texture in Celestia, since we don't know much about it)
7) Middle click and hold down, and drag the mouse until you're at a distance of 658,000 kilometers.
8) Press ctrl-'+' to zoom, until the resolution of Phoebe that you're seing on the screen is about the same as that in the NASA picture (note: resolution, not size. The nasa picture is enlarged).
9) Without changing the zoom, hold middle click againa nd drag the mouse until the distance is 2,000 kilometers.
10) Hold down shift, and use the arrow keys to look around. That's the sort of resolution images that they should be able to get.
Impressive, isn't it? I can't wait!
Anticipation (Score:5, Informative)
The newest images of Phoebe are already thousands of times better than the previous ones taken by the Voyager 2 mission in 1981.
No, but it is hoped they will be. At best, the newest released images are 10x better than Voyager. Expect the high res images later today. You are getting ahead of yourself.
Re:Everything is a moon (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Everything is a moon (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Question (Score:3, Informative)
Captured asteroid? (Score:5, Informative)
Phoebe is actually believed to be a captured Kuiper Belt object (KBO). This means its composition might be very icy/organic, making it more like a non-active comet than an asteroid.
Re:When it's actually arriving (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Everything is a moon (Score:4, Informative)
Before being a smart ass... (Score:3, Informative)
There is no DSN tracking pass today, so the high res images won't even be in JPL's hot little hands until tomorrow afternoon.
Re:Everything is a moon (Score:4, Informative)
Actually it is [yahoo.com].
It's interesting because it only reflects 6% of the suns light received. According to the article I linked, the darkness could be attributed to carbon and scientists are fairly certain that frozen water is there -- two of the main ingredients for life as we know it, not that they are expecting to find any life there.
Re:When it's actually arriving (indeed) (Score:3, Informative)
Re:When it's actually arriving (Score:3, Informative)
It's at 20:56 UTC ERT, the SCET (Spacecraft Event Time) was at 19:34 UTC.
See this link for an explination of the time conventions: http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/basics/bsf2-3.html [nasa.gov]
Actually UTC is damn awful time system because of leap seconds which cannot be predicted. All calculations must use ET (Ephemeris Time) which is almost always SCET. The 'REAL' flyby occured around 19:35 ET, the exact time to be determined from tracking after the flyby.
Re:And the pictures arrive when? (Score:3, Informative)
After that they will take some time to process, but when they are released they will either be at www.ciclops.org or saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.
Re:For those of us who aren't astrophysicists. (Score:2, Informative)
Just out of interest, how is the second word pronounced ?...
Roughly: Hoy-ginz. We got a pair of servers in a few months ago, named them Cassini and Huygens. First thing we had to do was look that up exactly that.