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Space Science

Saturn Moon Continues to Delight and Baffle 190

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the scientists-happier-when-baffled dept.
vic_1066 writes to tell us that BBC News is reporting on the many interesting discoveries made by the Cassini probe. The Saturn moon, Enceladus, apparently continues to provide confusion and excitement for scientists the world over. The Cassini probe has been making waves ever since its arrival to the Saturn system.
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Saturn Moon Continues to Delight and Baffle More

Saturn Moon Continues to Delight and Baffle

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  • What?!!? (Score:5, Funny)

    by _Sharp'r_ ( 649297 ) <sharper AT booksunderreview DOT com> on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @10:36PM (#13442534) Homepage Journal
    "The Cassini probe has been making waves ever since it's arrival to the Saturn system."

    What, now there's water on Saturn, too!

    (I know, I know, it's not a rock like Mars is... gimme a little rope here for the joke, k?)
    • Come on tell me you don't want to go surfing on the rings of saturn.

      • IMPORTANT !!!! MOD THIS UP !!!! (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        has been making waves ever since it's arrival

        "its".

        To the moderators: It is absolutely VITAL that you mod this post up, so that the editor and submitter can see it. (This is why I have posted it as close to the top as I can.) Now I know that, in the past, we have had our differences, and you have seen fit to mod my posts down for some inexplicable reason. Please note that this post is ON-TOPIC, because it refers SPECIFICALLY to the article summary. However, if you still feel that you want to mod this post d
      • for surfing, you want the Phoenix Asteroids [theofficia...penter.com]
    • Clearly they mean gravity waves, which is nothing special because it's been doing that since long before it was even put together. The people of millions of years ago--people all over the world and possibly some comets--would be walking around thinking to themselves in perfect English, "That tugging? It's that pre-Cassini chunk of ore, all right! It'll really make waves someday when it arrives in the Saturn system."

  • Couldn't help myself (Score:5, Funny)

    by uberjoe ( 726765 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @10:37PM (#13442537)
    That's no moon! It's a space station! And many Bothans died to bring us that information.

  • Mmmmm... Moon! (Score:5, Funny)

    by GreatRedShark ( 880833 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @10:37PM (#13442541)
    I knew I was delighted when I read the name of the moon... until I realized it's not "Enchiladas"... :(

  • What about Iapetus? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @10:39PM (#13442554)
    http://www.enterprisemission.com/moon1.htm/ [enterprisemission.com]

  • More (Better) Information... (Score:5, Informative)

    by jsight ( 8987 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @10:40PM (#13442560) Homepage
    As usual, get the information straight from NASA [nasa.gov]

    Press Release [nasa.gov], Pictures [nasa.gov]

    • Cracks me up (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Markus Registrada ( 642224 )
      I love reading these NASA and JPL press releases.

      "Scientists are baffled! We can't account for polar heating / overlapping flat-bottomed craters on Mars / volcanoes drifting around the surface of Io / particles blasting out of the sun at a quarter of lightspeed / gullies that cross over one another / the enormous explosion out of that comet!"

      Of course they're baffled. They won't let anybody competent explain it to them. These guys never studied plasma fluid dynamics in school, and they figure that now

      • You also forget that NASA is a "serious" govenment science agency... they're not about to start saying that X is caused by Y until they're SURE about it. Sure, it's likely, but I'd be disappointed if they routinely concluded cause/effect quickly for stuff like this.

        (you may argue the statement about seriousness all you want - but the point is the same for any science institution).

        MadCow.

        • Re:Cracks me up (Score:2, Insightful)

          by phxbadash ( 883828 )
          Instead they just invent things to satisfy their ever-more-convoluted theories. i.e. black holes, dark matter, dark energy.

        • Re:Cracks me up (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Markus Registrada ( 642224 ) on Wednesday August 31, 2005 @09:20AM (#13445391)
          ... they're not about to start saying that X is caused by Y until they're SURE about it.

          That would be fine, except that every single one of these press releases is filled with wild speculation -- subsurface water, volcanism, recent meteor strikes, martians, what have you -- anything and everything except the only thing that has ever been observed to cause (e.g.) polar heating.

          Never mind trotting out black holes, billion-solar-mass black holes, "dark matter" (imagined to constitute 90% of the mass of the universe), "dark energy" (part of it? supposed to repel matter), the "Great Attractor", galactic lensing, "magnetic reconnection", WIMPs, MACHOs, the Big Bang, Inflation, zero-point energy, and worse, without even a trace of embarrassment. That, and cropping from Hubble pictures anything embarrassing, such as quasars actually in front of opaque nearby galaxies.

          After the last cosmic background experiment concluded, Georg Smoot at a podium announced, in the the most smug of terms, that it proved the Big Bang theory "correct, once and for all." Of course no single experiment, or even a dozen, can do any such thing, and Big Bang is looking iffier every month.

          • Never mind trotting out black holes, billion-solar-mass black holes

            Um, these almost certainly exist.

            galactic lensing,

            This definitely exists.

            the Big Bang

            has quite a bit of evidence for it.

            zero-point energy

            This exists too.

            That, and cropping from Hubble pictures anything embarrassing, such as quasars actually in front of opaque nearby galaxies.

            Cite?

            and Big Bang is looking iffier every month.

            Doubtful.
            • ... Never mind trotting out ... billion-solar-mass black holes ... Um, these almost certainly exist.

              Based only on the assumption that nothing but gravitation can produce x-rays and high-velocity jets, or affect motion of large (electrically-conductive) masses. Even your "super-massive black holes" aren't enough to account for galactic rotation; you need to make up "dark matter" too.

              galactic lensing, ... This definitely exists.

              Sure, here and there. But it gets trotted out every time somebody points

          • That would be fine, except that every single one of these press releases is filled with wild speculation

            That's true but the press release is clear about it. It basically says "we have no clue what is happening but here are some possibilities". This is a press release after all and hardly a scientific paper. That being said I also get really irritated by the pontificating idiots they sometimes get to explain things who so often gloss over (or ignore) the fact that what they are saying is speculation and no

            • ugh, wish I had points to mod this idiocy down. The above post is nothing more than a wacky conspiracy troll. Mods---> just because something seems contrarian and perhaps superficially insightful, definitely does not mean that it actually is.
              • wish I had points to mod this idiocy down

                Yes, censorship is the answer to all inconveniences. Facts and discussion of facts might make some people momentarily uncomfortable.

                Those made most uncomfortable will be those who have invested years studying things that don't exist, and those who don't feel confident about picking up the mathematical skills needed to study the stuff that we do know exists.

            • It is interesting that we should be talking about wild speculation here because actually dark matter is thought to make up ~23% of the universe and dark energy ~76% (1% being "normal" baryonic, luminous matter).

              Oh, is it 99% now? How that number keeps growing. It has nowhere to go, now, but asymptotic. Let's project where it will be in five years: 99.999% of the mass of the universe (100,000 times as much mass as the bits we see, a thousand times as much stuff as we needed this year) will be composed o

              • Let's project where it will be in five years: 99.999% of the mass of the universe (100,000 times as much mass as the bits we see...

                You clearly don't understand the difference between dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter hass mass, dark energy is gravitationally repulsive and so clearly is not mass (though it is energy). Rotational curves of galaxies add further support for the idea of dark matter. The "dark energy" is not at all understood. It might be something real or it might be the effect of mass

      • Re:Cracks me up (Score:2, Insightful)

        by weemattisnot ( 703387 )
        I'm always sceptical when I read a "Scientists Baffled by WotNot-X" article.

        I think that they're not actually all that baffled about what's going on, but that saying "We're baffled, and learning SOOO much from this" is intelligent PR that helps these scientists get more public support, and indirectly funding as well.

        I mean if they said "Great - now we understand (most) everything that's going on at Saturn." then they'd be up excrement-creek without funding.

        Now don't get me wrong here. I'm all for money

      • Re:Cracks me up (Score:5, Informative)

        by mopomi ( 696055 ) on Wednesday August 31, 2005 @10:27AM (#13445977)
        . . .We can't account for . . . volcanoes drifting around the surface of Io. . .


        1) The volcanoes at Io's surface have nothing to do with plasma physics or MHD.
        2) No volcanoes have "drifted around" the surface of Io.
        3) There have been migrations of Ionian eruption plumes (the gas/dust "geysers" above the surface).
        4) We can quite readily explain this with simple thermophysics. Plasma or MHD has nothing to do with it.
        5) Some people have claimed that MHD has influenced the shape of plumes, but we can't reconcile that with the observations of WHERE the fields interact with Io.
        6) Some have claimed that electric currents can cause the elevated temperatures of some of Io's volcanoes, but they haven't done the simple math to know that even at 100% efficiency, there simply isn't enough energy available, and AGAIN, the field lines don't intersect the high temperature volcanoes.

        Theory is fine, but if your pet theory can't handle the observations, go back to the theory--the observations are rarely "wrong".

        . . . gullies that cross over one another. . .

        Not sure what the hell this has to do with plasma physics or MHD. Electrical currrents don't do a damned thing to effect morphology. Same with craters. Same with IMPACTS into comets and subsequent ejection of materials.

        Are you really claiming that high energy particles accelerated by the nearly non-existant magnetic field of Mars is causing flat-bottomed craters?! Wow! They must be moving really fucking fast.

        Not sure what you mean that "these guys" never studied plasma fluid dynamics. If by, "these guys", you mean planetary scientists, cosmologists, or astronomers (all VERY broad fields), "they" invented or extended just about any new branch physics (I'm talking real science, with perdictions and ways to test the predictions) you care to talk about.

        Who the hell modded that post "insightful"?
        • It's interesting to see these two statements so close to one another:

          Theory is fine, but if your pet theory can't handle the observations, go back to the theory--the observations are rarely "wrong".

          Electrical currrents don't do a damned thing to effect morphology.

          Observation is that there are whole lines [thunderbolts.info] of flat-bottomed [thunderbolts.info], overlapping craters [thunderbolts.info] on Mars, consistent in human experience only with Electric Discharge Machining. Theory says that nothing much electromagnetic can ever have happened on Mars be

          • Your first image is not from Mars. It's of a catena on Ganymede, and the chain is about 150--200 km long. This was almost certainly created by a comet breakup similar to the breakup of Shoemaker-Levy 9. We watched SL9 break up and impact Jupiter, producing similar "features". We've never, ever seen EDM on such a scale.

            Your second image is perfectly consistent with aborted graben formation. Your third image is, again, consistent with the breakup of a comet or asteroid before impact.

            I note that you do no
            • Your first image is not from Mars. It's of a catena on Ganymede, and the chain is about 150--200 km long.

              Fine. This makes an enormous difference, doesn't it?

              ... Shoemaker-Levy 9. We watched SL9 break up and impact Jupiter, producing similar "features".

              For a sufficiently dissimilar grade of "similar". Jupiter doesn't have any craters that I know about. (Maybe you have private information.) SL9 pieces hit thousands of miles apart. What broke up something, but kept all the bits right next to one ano

        • 1) The volcanoes at Io's surface have nothing to do with plasma physics or MHD.

          Easy to say. "Much to the astonishment of mission scientists, it was discovered that the 'volcanic' plumes emit ultraviolet light [thunderbolts.info], something inconceivable under normal conditions of volcanic venting."

          2) No volcanoes have "drifted around" the surface of Io.

          No, just the place where stuff comes out. "Since the Voyager observations in the late 1970s, Prometheus and the exposed regions have traveled more than 80 kilometers".

  • Maybe they'll discover oil or uranium (Score:5, Funny)

    by xtal ( 49134 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @10:40PM (#13442561)
    ..then we can have a hope of a mission there. Without upsetting the monoliths!

  • For those who care about who... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rob_squared ( 821479 ) <<rob> <at> <rob-squared.com>> on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @10:41PM (#13442569)
    ...the moon is named after:

    "In Greek mythology Enceladus was a Titan who was defeated in battle and buried under Mount Etna by Athena."

  • We spend all this money to survey the popular moons around Saturn, and all of the suddenly a moon that no one heard of is grabbing headlines. So is Tom Cruise making out with Katie Holmes behind Enceladus?

  • Great things come in small packages (Score:5, Interesting)

    by lightyear4 ( 852813 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @10:46PM (#13442609)

    These are the things that make this universe so incredible! Nature may be governed by general laws, but she will never allow a dull moment

    For such a tiny moon (its only 500km across), this one packs plenty of surprises. This oddity has: a localized hotspot at its southern pole, a largely water vapor atmostphere with some interesting trace compounds, and most intriguingly, a spot on the very short list of places possibly harboring life.

    Absolutely intriguing - congrats to the Cassini team for their achievements.

  • Oh, just great (Score:5, Funny)

    by nacturation ( 646836 ) <nacturation&gmail,com> on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @10:49PM (#13442629) Journal
    So at the equator it's several hundred degrees below zero -- cold enough to freeze your balls off in 2.3 seconds. At the south polar region, it's a bit less... cold enough to freeze your balls off in 2.15 seconds. When do we send the manned mission?
     

  • It'd be interesting (Score:5, Interesting)

    by krymsin01 ( 700838 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @10:49PM (#13442631) Homepage Journal
    if the source of the heat turned out to be a natural nuclear reactor, like Oklo [wikipedia.org]. I doubt that's a possibility, since I would think it'd put off a lot more heat if it were.

    • Re:It'd be interesting (Score:4, Informative)

      by deglr6328 ( 150198 ) on Wednesday August 31, 2005 @12:06AM (#13443109)
      This is probably EXTEMELY unlikey. The reason being that the half life of U235 (the fissionable isotope) is "only" 700 Myears (U238's is 4.5 Gyears). Therefore the original amount of U235 present in the protoplanetary solar system is ~99% gone (the solar system is 4.5 GY old). This is why the Oklo reactors are not going anymore, they existed 2 GY ago because back then the natural abundance of U235 in U ore was ~3% (and what's the concentration of U235 in nuclear reactors?....yup ~3%). I think this fact also VERY likely precludes the existance of a natural nuclear reactor at Enceladus now as well.
      • I think this fact also VERY likely precludes the existance of a natural nuclear reactor at Enceladus now as well.

        How about a recent cometary impact? It might have created a pod of water under the surface of the south pole, which is slowly leaking heat and water into the outside.

        Stephen Baxter incoporated this idea into his book Titan, and suggested there might be ice packs above a deep body of water. In the case of this small moon I would suggest that the heat pulse from the impact would spread out slowly

    • Note the information on why natural nuclear reaction doesn't occur on Earth anymore, if the moon is in anyway related to a similar age as Earth then it too wouldn't occur anymore.

      Then again, was an interesting read. +1 Interesting to you, if I didn't reply.

  • AvP? (Score:1)

    by UniXY ( 888820 )
    Someone contact the predators... we may have a problem. On second thought, give Arnold a ring too.

  • hmm (Score:5, Funny)

    by i_should_be_working ( 720372 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @10:59PM (#13442695)
    Enceladus, apparently continues to provide confusion and excitement for scientists the world over.

    Why? Is Enceladus a naked girl?
    Har har har.

  • In other news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by jeffehobbs ( 419930 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @11:01PM (#13442707) Homepage
    ..."Sailor Moon" continues to simply baffle.

    ~jeff

  • it's != its (Score:2, Informative)

    by GrahamCox ( 741991 )
    C'mon, it's really simple:

    it's ::= "it is" | "it has"

    for ALL OTHER USES, there is no apostrophe in 'its'

    Surely this simple rule isn't beyond the tech-heads here? For those of us that care about English this is as jarring a syntax error as anything that would barf a compiler. So do our parsers a favour and LEARN this simple rule.

    • Re:it's != its (Score:2, Offtopic)

      by NanoGator ( 522640 )
      "Surely this simple rule isn't beyond the tech-heads here? For those of us that care about English this is as jarring a syntax error as anything that would barf a compiler. So do our parsers a favour and LEARN this simple rule."

      Every single time a comment like yours flies across my screen I am reminded of Hermoine saying "... or worse, expelled."

    • because enceladus appears to be wonderful place to send hysterical grammar nazis on a one-way trip
    • You might be interested to learn that there is a rule which I have found helps people remember better than the way you've put it:

      Pronouns do not take possessive apostrophes.

      His, hers, its, theirs, etc. "Its" is not as irregular as people think.

      Cheers
      J.
      • Don't forget yours, ours, and whose. If you want irregular, the first-person singular pronoun is your friend.

        I'm almost tempted to make your point into a signature line around here, but for the fear that it will turn any insightful or informative comment I make into an off-topic, flamebaiting troll. ;)
      • Pronouns do not take possessive apostrophes

        Sad to say but I think most people don't actually know what pronouns and possessives are. On the other hand slashdot readers might "get it" if it's presented as a simple pseudo-code like statement:

        if ("it is"||"it has") then

        substitute(it's)

        else

        print(its)

    • For those of us that care about English this is as jarring a syntax error

      It's a LEXICAL error. The person understands the difference between the two, he/she just can't spell it correctly. If you're going to make a comparison with compilers, get the fucking terminology correct.

      Anyway... Are you trying to say that you're only as smart as a compiler? Yeah, confusing the two is incorrect, but if your mental parser can't deal with a simple misplaced apostrophe... are you saying that's a sign that you're int

    • It's "come on", not C'mon. You cannot turn "come on" into a contraction. For those of us that care about English this is as jarring a syntax error as anything that would barf a compiler. So do our parsers a favour and LEARN what you can and cannot make contractions out of.

  • What a coincidence! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @11:20PM (#13442822)
    My moon also continues to Delight and Baffle!

    Wanna see?

  • Most interesting part of the article... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Its about to crash into England [bbc.co.uk]!

  • Enterprise Mission (Score:1, Informative)

    by cbelle13013 ( 812401 )
    If you want to read some kooky stuff about all of this, check out EnterpriseMission.com [enterprisemission.com] that guy has tons of interesting stuff about the moons. Sure, there are some segments that are to far out there, but it makes for an interesting read. He predicted half of this stuff and was a big wig at NASA for a while.
    • Emphasis on kooky. Refer to this site [badastronomy.com] for a nice debunking of some of Hoagland's claims. Of course, not everything is debunked (the man seems to come up with a new conspiracy theory every week), but it's enough to kill his credibility.

    • Re:Enterprise Mission (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Dmala ( 752610 ) on Wednesday August 31, 2005 @01:14AM (#13443405)
      It's funny, Richard Hoagland is on Coast-to-Coast AM pretty regularly. (What can I say? I'm an insomniac and it's an entertaining show.) On the radio, he sounds very smart and usually quite rational. The web site, on the other hand, is so kooky it's almost hard to believe that it's written by the same person. He seems to be extremely fond of zooming waaay in on heavily compressed JPEG images and imagining all kinds of artificial formations in the compression artifacts. I wonder sometimes if he really believes all this stuff, or if it's just a ploy to get attention and presumably bring in $$$.

      FWIW, his own biography says he was a museum curator, a NASA consultant (whatever that means), and a science advisor to CBS news. It's a more impressive resumé than your garden variety conspiracy nut, but he wasn't exactly a "big wig at NASA".

      • I sense that Hoagland, as people tend to do, largely believes his own bullshit. Still, he knows it's bullshit. His talent is for handling large amounts of cognitive dissonance.

  • You want my guess? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Dasher42 ( 514179 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @11:52PM (#13443021)
    An off the cuff guess? About that warm spot and tiger stripe at Encaladus's south pole?

    Meteor impact, and seismic aftereffects.

    After all, it has the "Death Star" moon for a neighbor: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/media/ca ssini-080505.html [nasa.gov]
  • Can somebody explain to me how the atmosphere on this moon can be water vapour based when it is so cold. Won't rapid condensation result..followed by freezing?

    Or is the water vapor atmosphere being put out by massive jets which are themselves caused by the icy surface being in touch with the molten core?

    If these jets do exist they must be huge and it seems likely that whereever these jets exist, that those areas are much warmer than other places on the moon - perhaps even as warm as places on earth.

    Anyone w
    • Yes, Enceladus is too cold, and too light to maintain an atmosphere.

      This means that the water ice either rapidly falls back to the surface, or else is the source of material for Saturn's icy F(I think) ring, which is basically a line of water ice circling Saturn.

      What makes this discovery interesting is that in order for there to be a detectable atmosphere on Enceladus, there must be some process as it cannot last by itself.

      Hopefully the Cassini mission will reveal that source in time.

    • PV=nRT because the pressure is very low, the freezing point and boiling point lower. out there in hard vacumn, the boiling point of water is only a few degrees kelvin.
      • You're right that at low pressures, water is a vapor at low temperatures... But the Ideal Gas Law has absolutely NOTHING to do with it.
        • I beg to differ. =)

          You can derive density from the ideal gas law (n/V), as well as density/temperature ratios. The Ideal Gas Law is routinely used to calculate these kinds of observations. The stumbling block in this particular situation, however, is that the atmosphere of a planet is a non-closed system. Therefore, you have to model a series of cubic boxes around the planet and use integral calculus to determine the solutions to the equations.

          When I was in the Honors General Chemistry class at the Univ

  • Assuming it's mostly water... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Vo0k ( 760020 ) on Wednesday August 31, 2005 @02:07AM (#13443614) Journal
    Google calc fun:
    ((G * (4 / 3) * pi * ((250 km)^3) * ((1 metric ton) / (m^3))) / ((250 km)^2)) / gravity on earth = 0.00712572516

    For these less scientifically inclined, assuming Enceladus is like Holland, you go there and buy 3 grams (a tiny box) of ganja, then smuggle back to country.

    (gravity on earth / ((G * (4 / 3) * pi * ((250 km)^3) * ((1 metric ton) / (m^3))) / ((250 km)^2))) * (3g of ganja) = 0.928167691 pounds of ganja
    That's almost a pound of ganja on Earth surface.
    In other news, if you accidentially knock a pizza off the table on Enceladus, you have about 5s to catch it before it falls to the floor.
  • according to the illustration on the bottom of the bbc story, enceladus is going to impact great britain in about 5 minutes
  • The timing of the craft's ion and neutral mass spectrometer and the cosmic dust analyzer observations seems to indicate the vapor and fine material are originating from the "hot" polar cap region.

    We have only gone and become star trek.
  • Well, of COURSE it's got a "hot spot", with a name like Enchiladas.
  • These results were oriinally published in 2004.
  • Now I have to move the base again.

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