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Cassini/Huygens

The esa media gallery appears to be down
 
toddjh said:
Yeah. Wonder if it's the thick atmosphere, or some kind of liquid? I don't know much about geology. Are those squiggles in the high-altitude pic rivers, or mountains, or what?
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They were speculating that it might be drainage channels flowing to what looks like a shoreline.
 
The release was delayed while they airbrushed out the aliens...

Just kidding. Awesome pictures! Nothing like I imagined. I don't know if it's true, but looks like they scored a bullseye, capturing terrain from both light and dark regions.

Already a great success for the ESA.
 
They look very similar to the meandering channels you find in flat, poorly drained areas on Earth such as mudflats or blanket bog....

For a flat area to need draining, it must almost certainly rain (ethane?) there. There aren't many other possibilities: seasonal freezing and melting cycles of the atmosphere, maybe. Rain looks much more likely prospect to me. Any thoughts?

ETA:
Raw triplet images from the DISR: http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~kholso/jpeg/triplet.**.jpg

Are the ones with the burnt out bright spot showing the downward pointing lamp shining right into the ground?
 
Sometimes, I am in utter awe of the abilities of the human race. And, once again, it is science which does it. In the last 400 years, science went from looking at the planets to landing on them; what has astrology done?

Apart from being designed to survive a landing on just about any terrain, the thing was launched from Cassini by springs,

...giving a whole new meaning to the Calvin & Hobbes title, "Scientific Progress goes 'boink' ".

Oi...you just gave me flashbacks to the paranoid eco-ranting about how the plutonium would kill us all.

Actually, that was literally true. Cassinni DID carry about a billion times more Pu than the lethal dose... which means it could have killed a billion people... IF its Pu-payload was divided evenly into a billion tiny little bits, and all those people would stand in line patiently waiting to be injected with the lethal dose.

I have a knife in my kitchen. If everybody on earth stands patiently in line as I go from one to the other and stab them in the heart, it's possible for me (if I live another 5,000,000,000 second, or about 170 years...) to do in the entire human race.

It's not too likely, but this doesn't change the FACT that I HAVE A KNIFE IN MY KITCHEN that CAN KILL US ALL!!!!!!!!

AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!! Run for your lives!!!

And my favorite image so far, due to it looking so damn science-fictiony:

PIA06172-br500.jpg


"We are in the pipe, five by five... where's the damn beacon?"
 
awesome. can't wait for more.

Dumb question time.
I love to look at the Mars rovers photos, and I am wondering why they use black and white cameras. Also now the photos from Huygens. Is it because black and white photos are smaller so easier to send, or that the cameras are simpler and more reliable?
 
Didn't they put a microphone on the probe. When are we going to be able to go to sleep to "the sounds of Saturn's Moon".
 
FFed said:
awesome. can't wait for more.

Dumb question time.
I love to look at the Mars rovers photos, and I am wondering why they use black and white cameras. Also now the photos from Huygens. Is it because black and white photos are smaller so easier to send, or that the cameras are simpler and more reliable?
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The latter. As I understand it, color cameras are basically three separate black-and-white cameras rolled into one, each using a different filter. If you're patient, you only need the one camera, and can take a series of pictures while just switching the filters, and then combine the images into a perfectly serviceable color version (that's how the beautiful color images from pretty much all our spacecraft are taken).

Add to that the fact that color is usually not important for the science aspects of a mission, and a color camera becomes a waste of precious space and weight on a spacecraft.

Jeremy
 
Skeptic said:
Sometimes, I am in utter awe of the abilities of the human race. And, once again, it is science which does it.
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Absolutely. Such moments are mankind's finest hours.
 
Skeptic said:

"We are in the pipe, five by five... where's the damn beacon?"
Click to expand...

Fortunately it's not yet:

[whiny Hudson voice]"Game over, man! It's game over!"[/whiny Hudson voice]
 
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