Is Mimas Hiding Pac-Man? 99
cremeglace writes "Shaped into the likes of the Death Star of Star Wars fame by the giant crater Herschel, 396-kilometer-diameter Mimas was expected to have its warmest surface temperatures on the equator, where it was early afternoon. Instead, it was warmest in the morning (all of 92 K), giving rise in the science team's temperature-calibrated color scheme to a very large Pac-Man."
Cost per Bit (Score:1, Interesting)
They say the Cassini Program costs less -per bit of data sent- than an SMS.
If you've got some hard math on that, please post it.
Surface composition? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Cost per Bit (Score:5, Interesting)
No, there have however been discussion on the cost of the downlink from the Hubble space telescope: http://www2.le.ac.uk/ebulletin/news/press-releases/2000-2009/2008/05/nparticle.2008-05-12.4476906328 [le.ac.uk]
In essence, a sending data via text will give you bills for around GBP 350 per MB. The funny thing with this is of-course that sending texts is basically for the operator free of charge as it is only using excess capacity of the mobile networks, that is, text messages have no guaranteed delivery and will simply be dropped in case a link is congested. The only cost that texts infer are the operational costs with maintaining the servers that manages the texts, but you cannot expect that that will be a very high cost.
Re:Surface composition? (Score:2, Interesting)