Cassini-Huygens Reaches Phoebe

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."

For those of us who aren't astrophysicists.

[Short Circuit]

Google search, "define: retrograde [google.com]"

Re:No Different

[FluffyG]

Many people have that same idea about NASA and its exploration, that it will not give any valuable insight or information regarding the universe. I would like to think out of all of the mysteries of earth, space is the biggest one. Hopefully one day there will be valuable insight and information that will support a need for NASA besides pictures and samples of surfaces that wont even make it back to earth for a more indepth examination. These probes may gather the specific information the scientists are looking for but maybe something new can be found from looking and studying it in person, and perhaps some new tests could be created that could give us the valuable insight we seek.

On the contrary

[lockefire]

On the contrary, the phoebe probe will give us extremely valuable insight into the creation of our Solar System. In fact, it already has in that it is cratered (albeit, not seen as a major discovery to most people). Scientists have wondered for years how it managed to only reflect 6% of the light hitting it. In addition, since this may be a Kuiper object, it would be the only (relatively) stationary one within reasonable range from Earth to study.

When it's actually arriving

[david.given]

Look, guys, saying that it arrives at '1:56 PST' is bloody useless. Apart from the fact that Pacific Time is largely meaningless to most of the world, you don't even say whether that's morning or afternoon!

Having scoured the web sites --- it's actually quite hard to find the information --- the probe is doing the close flyby at 2056 UTC (i.e. about two and a half hours from now). Assuming I've got the daylight saving compensation right, of course...

Re:No Different

[Teancum]

While I would have to agree that it seems as though if you've seen one moon, you've seen them all, it still adds value for the Cassini probe (not Phoebe, but I understand what you are hinting at) to explore Phoebe.

And yes, it is very possible that something unexpected will be seen. That would indeed give valuable insite. Even if it is just an ordinary hunk of rock, it will still give insight into the composition of other Saturnian moons and what to expect in that region of the solar system. Even as just a simple data point. It is expected that even more will be found, and frankly I look forward to visually exploring this world in a way that nobody until today has been able to see it like.

When the Voyager probes went by Io, there was no hint that it could possibly be showing active volcanoes, or be hinting at the distinct possibilities of seeing liquid oceans on Europa (admittedly buired under ice, but still there). I don't expect such a revelation with Phoebe, but you don't know. Perhaps a black monolith with proportions 1 x 4 x 9?

Re:Everything is a moon

[kfg]

The composition of the rings alone makes up a ton. So why is this one more interesting than others?

It isn't. It's just more accessable.

KFG

Re:You're a typical Slashbot dumbass.

[aelbric]

Your entire list of "issues" is made up of items that are entirely social in nature. Humankind could solve every single one of these if we could just put aside our petty differences and decide to do it. "Physician, heal thyself"

Space research is truly the last frontier. The knowledge derived from it lifts all humanity even if only from the perspective of giving us a glimpse into what all of us alive today will never see. Once a spacecraft leaves our planet it become research in it's purest form.

Fixing the roads may be important to you today but 1000 years from now will mankind get use from the fact that the local interstate had no potholes in 2004 or that a wealth of scientific information was gathered from Cassini?

Not Point, At This Point

[EXTomar]

Its lovely how there are cries of privatizing space and how we'd get to the stars faster if we only let regular joe mega corporations build spaceships. There plans go something like the familar pattern we've seen all over the place in /.

1. Privatize Space Exploration
2. ????
3. Profit!!

Right now there is little to no incentive for a company like Lockhead-Martin to build system to land people on the moon and build a moonbase. Science is a terrible profit motive unless you can find practicle applications. And since we know the moon isn't made of cheese (which you can sell) or littered with diamons the size of footballs no company has this burning desire to go into space. Its too costly to make money at it.

So we are stuck with government ventures. I'm glad the US, Russia, and China push these things but I have no illusions about how this works. They are doing it because their is a small bet of prestigue and a good way to spend military for R&D without making it so obvious.

So until you find out that Pheobe is made of 99% gold or Mars has rubies the size of boulders or something else interesting there is little point ot privatizing space over having world governments fund it. Simply put, governments don't care about profits.

Re:Not Point, At This Point

[EXTomar]

Yeah, bought and paid by the government. Lockhead-Martin will not go to the board and say "we think we can make money landing on the moon". They will go to the board with "we can make money selling a moon landing system to the government".

You find a public/private non-government entity that is willing to buy a moon landing system from LM and I'll conceed the point. Right now, there is no profit in deep space. Period. There is no modivation for investing capital in "noble causes". Its sad but very true.

Take a modern example: What profit is there in Cassini-Huygens? If you can figure that out sell it to someone and get rich and we all can send our space probes out there to take a close look at Saturn.

Where are the RAW Images!

[Jboy_24]

One of the greatest things about the Mars rovers page, is that you don't have to wait until NASA releases "press release" images in order to see the latest. You can access them through the mars rovers RAW images site probably a few hours after NASA got them.

I havn't seen any links to such a database for Casinni, but I really hope they set one up soon!