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Space Science

Cassini's Robot Lab Successfully Separates 94

Posted by timothy from the amicable-divorce dept.
toomanyairmiles writes "The BBC has an article indicating NASA's Cassini probe has successfully launched its robot lab on its three-week journey into the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan. 'Such is the chemistry and temperature (-180C) on Titan that scientists suspect it may harbour lakes, even great seas, of methane or ethane.' Seemingly we have very little idea of what we'll find there: 'Even Cassini's remarkable instruments have struggled to get at the facts. Scientists can see dark and bright regions on the surface, but quite what they represent no one is really sure.'"
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Cassini's Robot Lab Successfully Separates More

Cassini's Robot Lab Successfully Separates

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  • "Scientists can see dark and bright regions on the surface, but quite what they represent no one is really sure"

    What .. they are still using B&W television over there.

    • Re:Black and white (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      What .. they are still using B&W television over there.

      When there's only one wavelength that gets through the haze and back... yeah.

    • Re:Black and white (Score:2, Informative)

      by Science ( 843617 )
      Yes, they use B&W cameras. Astronomers are interested in detail first color second. Color cameras don't have the resolution of B&W. Color images are created by taking three idential B&W images through three different color filters. When combined and processed, the three B&W images produce a color image.

  • Huygens (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Anyone know why they named it Huygens? Is there a significance to that?

  • Sploosh (Score:3, Funny)

    by Faust7 ( 314817 ) on Saturday December 25, 2004 @06:33PM (#11182448) Homepage
    there is every possibility that Huygens will make a splashdown

    And, if the BBC's pic is correct, it will look almost exactly like an upended Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.

  • I Wanna See Rain! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Haydn Fenton ( 752330 ) <no.spam.for.haydn@gmail.com> on Saturday December 25, 2004 @06:35PM (#11182457)
    I can remember the BBC program about Titan, or some TV show about it anyway. It was pretty fascinating stuff really, especially how rain on Titan will appear. Because the atmosphere is more methane/ethane, when the rain falls, it will be like normal rain at first because higher up in the air it will be colder and the methane/ethane will be liquid, but as it gets closer to the surface, it will turn into a gas as it warms up, so the rain will turn from liquid into a gas before it reaches the surface, and will then rise upwards. Hellish cool if you ask me. Especially if its green, I think it was on the TV show, although clearly thats just a mock up. And seas of methane and ethane will also be cool, if theyre green.. probably wont be, but hey.
    Bring on the rain!
    • Indeed, the rain thingy must be really cool to see.

      I already thought of the oceans of methane and ethane... Damn, they must look so incredibly cool... It really makes you wanna take a bath in them.
      Or... well... Probably rather not.
    • "when the rain falls, it will be like normal rain at first because higher up in the air it will be colder and the methane/ethane will be liquid, but as it gets closer to the surface, it will turn into a gas as it warms up, so the rain will turn from liquid into a gas before it reaches the surface, and will then rise upwards."

      Actually this already happens here on Earth (only with water).

      There are desert areas (Sahara included IIRC) where sometimes it rains and the rain evaporates before it can hit the grou

      • Re:I Wanna See Rain! (Score:5, Informative)

        by NoseBag ( 243097 ) on Saturday December 25, 2004 @08:04PM (#11182771)


        In Arizona, its called Virga i.e. rain that never reaches the ground.

        Its actually quite neat to see in the distance. You can see the downpour falling, usually from under a nice dark thundercloud (uh, where else?), and then it kinda gets fuzzy and vague, and then it just....isn't. The "isn't" boundary also moves up and down slowly - due to air currents and such, I guess. Its quite peaceful to observe.

      • Cool. I'll go google it, I hope I can find a video of it. Thanks :)
    • This sort of process is fairly normal in places like Arizona or the far western Sahara, for example. I was pretty excited about seeing it the first time I went to Arizona, only to find out that there isn't much to see except a slightly overcast cover in the sky.

    • Re:I Wanna See Rain! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by isolationism ( 782170 ) on Saturday December 25, 2004 @11:47PM (#11183483) Homepage
      As I understand it, the ethane/methane "rain" will also be the size of golf balls because of the low gravity. This is only, I confess, according to Stephen Baxter's Titan which I just finished reading.

      Anyone looking for a good, very hard sci-fi read on the subject of Titan, the book is a great one. It has the added bonus of picking up more or less exactly right now, timeline-wise. It also has some rather frighteningly accurate forecasts with relation to the ... ah, U.S. political sentiment of the time. It was published in 1997.

  • Hooray for NASA/ESA collaboration (Score:5, Informative)

    by ikewillis ( 586793 ) on Saturday December 25, 2004 @06:35PM (#11182460) Homepage
    For those who don't know, the Hyugens probe bound for Titan was developed by the EU's Space Agency. It will provide us with the first glimpses below Titan's cloudy surface, and was carried by NASA's Cassini probe.

    It's wonderful to see such collaboration between the ESA and NASA, and I hope we continue to see such efforts in the future.

  • Ever see 2010? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Faust7 ( 314817 ) on Saturday December 25, 2004 @06:36PM (#11182466) Homepage
    Scientists can see dark and bright regions on the surface, but quite what they represent no one is really sure.

    My money's on the dark regions being a plague of multiplying monoliths. Cover your eyes...
    • It's asphalt parking lots and bright shopping malls full of shoe shops. A different type of replicator and far more frightening. The shoe-event horizon draws nigh!

  • Image of the Huygens/Cassini separation (Score:5, Informative)

    by ikewillis ( 586793 ) on Saturday December 25, 2004 @06:40PM (#11182475) Homepage
    Here's an excellent image of the seperation of the Cassini spacecraft with the Huygens probe bound for Titan:

    http://planetary.org/saturn/images_spacecraft.html [planetary.org]

  • To clarify... (Score:3, Informative)

    by ethnocidal ( 606830 ) on Saturday December 25, 2004 @06:40PM (#11182476) Homepage
    Cassini-Huygens is a joint mission between NASA and the European Space Agency - http://www.esa.int/ [esa.int]. Cassini (the main vehicle) is NASA's responsibility, and the robot probe called Huygens is ESA's.

    Good to see some international cooperation in a venture like this. After the stunning shots of Titan and Saturn returned by Cassini's sensors, we can only hope that the remote probe fares better than Beagle 2 :) ESA article with more information [esa.int]

    • All countries involved have something to be proud on. Nice to see American and Europe working towards a common goal instead of bickering. Merry Christmas everyone!
    • I was under the impression that the Italian Space Agency was also involved....but I may be getting my missions mixed up.
      • You would be correct sir. Of course, the details on the extent of collaboration is hidden beyond many layers of bereaurocracy, but what the hell.

    • Re:To clarify... (Score:3, Informative)

      by snake_dad ( 311844 )
      Good to see some international cooperation in a venture like this.

      If that aspect of this mission is news to you, you will probably be surprised to know that in many NASA missions there are several non-US instruments. An example that comes to mind is the Mossbauer Spectrometer on the instrument arm of the current Mars rovers. This experiment was built by a German university (IIRC). Another example of cooperation would be the tests that were done on Mars, sending data to Earth from the rovers, through the

  • An open door. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by OgTheBarbarian ( 778232 ) on Saturday December 25, 2004 @06:47PM (#11182500)
    Now just imagine, however inhospitable the conditions sound to us, if that probe came back with images of a civilization or even an outpost (inhabited or abandoned/destroyed). That one piece of news would turn the whole world on its edge. Sometimes great discoveries come, when you're not really looking for them. 'If it is just us, it seems like an awful waste of space.' - Contact
    • Unless all nasa probe data is scanned by norad/fema and if that ever happens then its time for a "oopps we lost signal, it failed to deploy chutes" press release and the earth population is once again free to live as normal consuming products and working like slaves for pittence rewards.

    • i don't think that's a very bright possibility, mainly because there is hardly any liquid water on mars. also the oxygen content is pretty low...
      • An outpost from an advanced civilization could survive in Martian conditions using technology that's similar to what a future Mars mission might be using. There's plenty of raw materials on Mars to make liquid water and oxygen.
    • It would turn popular opinion on edge. Posit the existence of life on Titan. Let's go so far as to say it's intelligent life, and that its level of technology is on a par with ours, except (presumably; we haven't seen evidence of it) no space exploration. How would that affect this planet? First, there's really no scare of invasions on either side. Titan isn't a lot like Earth; we couldn't use their land; they couldn't use ours. Not without great expenditures of money and technological advances. Where woul

      • Re:An open door. (Score:2, Funny)

        by 2A ( 841921 )
        Untrue. We'll immediately launch another probe with devices for detecting interplanetary WMDs, get bored waiting for it to get conclusive results, and so send bigger ships to liberate the methan^H^H^H^H^H^Htitans...

        Or maybe the TV appeals will start: "there's been life discovered on the moon, Titan. These lifeforms don't know the love and teachings of Jesus. We need you to donate money so we can build our own spaceship, so we can spread to word of Jesus to these so called 'Marklah'."

        But most likely, both
      • That's funny... that's what they said about Native Americans. And look what happened to them once the land became useful to us.

  • Huygens (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    That "robot lab" is called Huygens, but I guess that's too difficult for /. submitters/editors to spell.

  • Demonic discovery? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Xentropy ( 843502 ) on Saturday December 25, 2004 @08:09PM (#11182794)
    I find the random insertion by /. of a large Doom 3 ad (consisting of a closeup of a demonic figure) right after the text of this article an amusing irony. Just what DO we expect to find down there?

  • It's called HUYGENS!! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SeaDour ( 704727 ) on Saturday December 25, 2004 @08:46PM (#11182914) Homepage
    "Robot Lab"? WTF?!? Give some credit where it's due!

  • opinions (Score:4, Funny)

    by morcheeba ( 260908 ) on Saturday December 25, 2004 @09:34PM (#11183058) Journal
    Even Cassini's remarkable instruments have struggled to get at the facts.

    From what I heard, the instruments were just giving their opinions, ruminations, and vague rumors. One even broke into song, which, from a scientific viewpoint, yielded very little hard data...

  • Not enough time on the surface (Score:4, Insightful)

    by PingXao ( 153057 ) on Saturday December 25, 2004 @11:52PM (#11183495)
    I know there must be a zillion reasons why they designed the Huygens probe mission the way they did, but to me it seems like a pity that it's only got enough battery life to operate for 30 minutes on the surface after it lands, assuming it doesn't sink in a hydrocarbon lake. It took 7 years to get there for only 30 minutes worth of surface obserations? The results it sends back from only 30 minutes worth of surface exploration will surely raise more questions than they answer, and since this is the last of the big-ticket planetary probes we're likely to see for decades to come it just doens't seem like a long enough window to operate. Weight probably had a lot to do with the decisions made. Batteries are heavy. That plus the uncertainty as to whether it will land on solid ground at all most likely drove the 30-minute mission requirement, but it still seems too short. I must be getting spoiled by the Mars rovers.

    • Re:Not enough time on the surface (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 26, 2004 @01:43AM (#11183776)
      It will have been doing major science for over two hours by the time it lands, including taking pictures all the way down. Whatever it does on the surface is 'bonus' time. And no, if it splashes down in a lake, it will not sink. In fact, it has an instrument that will use sonar to try and determine the depth of the lake. Also, whatever it does on the surface is constrained not just by battery life, but by communications with Cassini -- which will vanish over Titan's horizon about an hour after the probe lands.
  • The cassini/huygens mission launched at 1997.
    However, in 2000 it became apparent that the
    Italians who were doing cassini-huygens comms,
    forgot to account for the doppler effect.
    This debacle would cut the comms time to only
    10% of planned communication time. NASA and ESA
    seem to remain silent about this foul up since
    then. Read more about it at
    http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/4/4137/1.htm l
  • Wired News has some pictures of Titan's surface taken by Cassini. The article explains somewhat the new questions the images have created, and what the Huygens mission hopes to accomplish in terms of answering those questions, including this explanation for the bright/dark spots:

    Do the dark areas in the radar images of Titan's surface signify the existence of lakes?

    When radar waves are used to create images of surfaces, areas that reflect more radio waves turn up as bright spots, while those that reflec

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