whoa thats crazy i dont get the sound tho has anyone else listened to that? it just sounds like static. and we spent so much money and we were all excited about hugens and all that and all i see is a couple pictures of the ground?... please say theres more to come as far as under the atmosphere titan pictures...
whoa thats crazy i dont get the sound tho has anyone else listened to that? it just sounds like static. and we spent so much money and we were all excited about hugens and all that and all i see is a couple pictures of the ground?... please say theres more to come as far as under the atmosphere titan pictures...
It will take them 10-15 years to pry all the interesting detail out of the data they're getting.
Believe me, these guys haven't been waiting 8 years for a few pictures of pebbles.
A large, bright and complex convective storm that appeared in Saturn's southern hemisphere in mid-September 2004 was the key in solving a long-standing mystery about the ringed planet.
Saturn's atmosphere and its rings are shown here in a false color composite made from Cassini images taken in near infrared light through filters that sense different amounts of methane gas. Portions of the atmosphere with a large abundance of methane above the clouds are red, indicating clouds that are deep in the atmosphere. Grey indicates high clouds, and brown indicates clouds at intermediate altitudes. The rings are bright blue because there is no methane gas between the ring particles and the camera.
The complex feature with arms and secondary extensions just above and to the right of center is called the Dragon Storm. It lies in a region of the southern hemisphere referred to as "storm alley" by imaging scientists because of the high level of storm activity observed there by Cassini in the last year.
The Dragon Storm was a powerful source of radio emissions during July and September of 2004. The radio waves from the storm resemble the short bursts of static generated by lightning on Earth. Cassini detected the bursts only when the storm was rising over the horizon on the night side of the planet as seen from the spacecraft; the bursts stopped when the storm moved into sunlight. This on/off pattern repeated for many Saturn rotations over a period of several weeks, and it was the clock-like repeatability that indicated the storm and the radio bursts are related. Scientists have concluded that the Dragon Storm is a giant thunderstorm whose precipitation generates electricity as it does on Earth. The storm may be deriving its energy from Saturn's deep atmosphere.
One mystery is why the radio bursts start while the Dragon Storm is below the horizon on the night side and end when the storm is on the day side, still in full view of the Cassini spacecraft. A possible explanation is that the lightning source lies to the east of the visible cloud, perhaps because it is deeper where the currents are eastward relative to those at cloud top levels. If this were the case, the lightning source would come up over the night side horizon and would sink down below the day side horizon before the visible cloud. This would explain the timing of the visible storm relative to the radio bursts.
The Dragon Storm is of great interest for another reason. In examining images taken of Saturn's atmosphere over many months, imaging scientists found that the Dragon Storm arose in the same part of Saturn's atmosphere that had earlier produced large bright convective storms. In other words, the Dragon Storm appears to be a long-lived storm deep in the atmosphere that periodically flares up to produce dramatic bright white plumes which subside over time. One earlier sighting, in July 2004, was also associated with strong radio bursts. And another, observed in March 2004 and captured in a movie created from images of the atmosphere (http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA06082 and http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA06083) spawned three little dark oval storms that broke off from the arms of the main storm. Two of these subsequently merged with each other; the current to the north carried the third one off to the west, and Cassini lost track of it. Small dark storms like these generally get stretched out until they merge with the opposing currents to the north and south.
These little storms are the food that sustains the larger atmospheric features, including the larger ovals and the eastward and westward currents. If the little storms come from the giant thunderstorms, then together they form a food chain that harvests the energy of the deep atmosphere and helps maintain the powerful currents.
Cassini has many more chances to observe future flare-ups of the Dragon Storm, and others like it over the course of the mission. It is likely that scientists will come to solve the mystery of the radio bursts and observe storm creation and merging in the next 2 or 3 years.
The shepherd moon, Pandora, is seen here alongside the narrow F ring that it helps maintain. Pandora is 84 kilometers (52 miles) across.
Cassini obtained this view from about four degrees above the ringplane. Captured here are several faint, dusty ringlets in the vicinity of the F ring core. The ringlets do not appear to be perturbed to the degree seen in the core.
The appearance of Pandora here is exciting, as the moon's complete shape can be seen, thanks to reflected light from Saturn, which illuminates Pandora's dark side. The hint of a crater is visible on the dark side of the moon.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 4, 2005, at a distance of approximately 967,000 kilometers (601,000 miles) from Pandora and at a Sun-Pandora-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 117 degrees. The image scale is 6 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel.
I have no grudge against your enthusiasm. But shouldn't we clean up our act on the one planet we live in before heading out to others? In the distant future, we might end up like locusts and leeches if we keep travelling from planet to planet just to consume it's resources.
And for a non-Cassini perspective for a change, Space.com offers Saturn in Visible and X-Ray
Quote:
Sparkling Saturn\t
\t\t
Saturn's rings light up with bright blue highlights, in this blend of both visual and X-ray observations.
Astronomers believe that fluorescence caused when solar X-rays smack into the oxygen molecules locked with in Saturn?s icy ring water.
As seen in this image, most of the X-rays among Saturn?s rings come from the B ring, the bright white, inner ring in the optical image of the planet.
There is some evidence for a concentration of X-rays on the morning side (left side, also called the East ansa) of the rings, possibly because X-rays are associated with optical features called spokes that are largely confined to the dense B ring and most often seen on the morning side.
Spokes are due to transient clouds of fine ice-dust particles that are lifted off the ring surface. It has been suggested that the spokes are triggered by meteoroid impacts, which are more likely in the midnight to early morning hours because during that period the relative speed of the rings through a cloud of meteoroids would be greater.
The higher X-ray brightness on the morning side of the rings could be due to the additional solar fluorescence from the transient ice clouds that produce the spokes. This explanation may also account for other Chandra observations of Saturn, which show that the X-ray brightness of the rings varies significantly from one week to the next.
Credit: X-ray: NASA/MSFC/CXC/A.Bhardwaj et al.; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI/AURA
They have previously reported on puzzling results from science in these bands and compared Chandra and HST
Quote:
Chandra's image of Saturn held some surprises for the observers. First, Saturn's 90 megawatts of X-radiation is concentrated near the equator. This is different from a similar gaseous giant planet, Jupiter, where the most intense X-rays are associated with the strong magnetic field near its poles.
Credit: X-ray: NASA/U. Hamburg/J.Ness et al; Optical: NASA/STScI
Saturn's radio emissions could be mistaken for a Halloween sound track. That's how two researchers describe their recent findings, published in the July 23 issue of the Geophysical Research Letters. Their paper is based on data from the Cassini spacecraft radio and plasma wave science instrument. The study investigates sounds that are not just eerie, but also descriptive of a phenomenon similar to Earth's northern lights.
"All of the structures we observe in Saturn's radio spectrum are giving us clues about what might be going on in the source of the radio emissions above Saturn's auroras," said Dr. Bill Kurth, deputy principal investigator for the instrument. He is with the University of Iowa, Iowa City. Kurth made the discovery along with Principal Investigator Don Gurnett, a professor at the University. "We believe that the changing frequencies are related to tiny radio sources moving up and down along Saturn's magnetic field lines."
The radio emissions, called Saturn kilometric radiation, are generated along with Saturn's auroras, or northern and southern lights. Because the Cassini instrument has higher resolution compared to a similar instrument on NASA's Voyager spacecraft, it has provided more detailed information on the spectrum and the variability of radio emissions. The high-resolution measurements allow scientists to convert the radio waves into audio recordings by shifting the frequencies down into the audio frequency range.
The terrestrial cousins of Saturn's radio emissions were first reported in 1979 by Gurnett, who used an instrument on the International Sun-Earth Explorer spacecraft in Earth orbit. Kurth said that despite their best efforts, scientists still haven't agreed on a theory to fully explain the phenomenon. They will get another chance to solve the radio emission puzzle beginning in mid-2008 when Cassini will fly close to, or possibly even through, the source region at Saturn. Gurnett said, "It is amazing that the radio emissions from Earth and Saturn sound so similar." Other contributors to the paper include University of Iowa scientists George Hospodarsky and Baptiste Cecconi; Mike Kaiser (currently at Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.); French scientists Philippe Louarn, Philippe Zarka and Alain Lecacheux; and Austrian scientists Helmut Rucker and Mohammed Boudjada. Cassini, carrying 12 scientific instruments, on June 30, 2004, became the first spacecraft to orbit Saturn. It is conducting a four-year study of the planet, its rings and many moons. The spacecraft carried the Huygens probe, a six-instrument European Space Agency probe that landed on Titan, Saturn's largest moon, in January 2005.
Click pic above for links to QT movie of Hyperion flyby.
Quote:
Cassini performed back-to-back flybys of Saturn moons Tethys and Hyperion last weekend, coming closer than ever before to each of them. Tethys has a scarred, ancient surface, while Hyperion is a strange, spongy-looking body with dark-floored craters that speckle its surface.
Click for news of 'doubleheader' flyby.
False colour close-up of Tethys. Click for details
Quote:
This view is among the closest Cassini images of Tethys' icy surface taken during the Sept. 24, 2005 flyby.
This false-color image, created with infrared, green and ultraviolet frames, reveals a wide variety of surface colors across this terrain. The presence of this variety at such small scales may indicate a mixture of different surface materials. Tethys was previously known to have color differences on its surface, especially on its trailing side, but this kind of color diversity is new to imaging scientists. For a clear-filter view of this terrain, see PIA07736.
Maybe a topic for a new thread.... but while space gives some people that sense of 'wonder'.. it depresses me..
One more plant, one more place you'll never see. And the kicker is.. none of this is new.. it's all been there long before we existed... and will continue to exist long after we are gone. So what if we see it?
It's like sensation 'freaks'. They live for the feeling of being alive. This seems almost the same. If the thrill is in the seeing.. does it really matter if you've seen a lot or seen a little? Because in the end.. you still dye...
So while we look to space for answers about who we are.. why we are here.. who or what else is 'out there'... I look inside and say what does all that abstract 'hypothesis' really matter? Most people struggle their whole lives just trying to figure out who *they themselves* are...
I dunno.. maybe I need prozac or something... (yeah yeah.. or something)
Comments
Originally posted by ipodandimac
fair enough, but i'd like my tax money back (the portion of it going to NASA).
No more GPS for you, or velcro, or centrifuged medicine, or ...
Originally posted by curiousuburb
No more GPS for you, or velcro, or centrifuged medicine, or ...
Originally posted by Ferali
whoa thats crazy i dont get the sound tho has anyone else listened to that? it just sounds like static. and we spent so much money and we were all excited about hugens and all that and all i see is a couple pictures of the ground?... please say theres more to come as far as under the atmosphere titan pictures...
It will take them 10-15 years to pry all the interesting detail out of the data they're getting.
Believe me, these guys haven't been waiting 8 years for a few pictures of pebbles.
There is polycarbures, erosion, atmoshpere. Titan is like a frozen earth. A sort of earth 3 billions of years ago.
As amorph stated, the complete analysis of all the data will recquiere years.
The Dragon Storm
February 24, 2005
Full-Res: PIA06197
A large, bright and complex convective storm that appeared in Saturn's southern hemisphere in mid-September 2004 was the key in solving a long-standing mystery about the ringed planet.
Saturn's atmosphere and its rings are shown here in a false color composite made from Cassini images taken in near infrared light through filters that sense different amounts of methane gas. Portions of the atmosphere with a large abundance of methane above the clouds are red, indicating clouds that are deep in the atmosphere. Grey indicates high clouds, and brown indicates clouds at intermediate altitudes. The rings are bright blue because there is no methane gas between the ring particles and the camera.
The complex feature with arms and secondary extensions just above and to the right of center is called the Dragon Storm. It lies in a region of the southern hemisphere referred to as "storm alley" by imaging scientists because of the high level of storm activity observed there by Cassini in the last year.
The Dragon Storm was a powerful source of radio emissions during July and September of 2004. The radio waves from the storm resemble the short bursts of static generated by lightning on Earth. Cassini detected the bursts only when the storm was rising over the horizon on the night side of the planet as seen from the spacecraft; the bursts stopped when the storm moved into sunlight. This on/off pattern repeated for many Saturn rotations over a period of several weeks, and it was the clock-like repeatability that indicated the storm and the radio bursts are related. Scientists have concluded that the Dragon Storm is a giant thunderstorm whose precipitation generates electricity as it does on Earth. The storm may be deriving its energy from Saturn's deep atmosphere.
One mystery is why the radio bursts start while the Dragon Storm is below the horizon on the night side and end when the storm is on the day side, still in full view of the Cassini spacecraft. A possible explanation is that the lightning source lies to the east of the visible cloud, perhaps because it is deeper where the currents are eastward relative to those at cloud top levels. If this were the case, the lightning source would come up over the night side horizon and would sink down below the day side horizon before the visible cloud. This would explain the timing of the visible storm relative to the radio bursts.
The Dragon Storm is of great interest for another reason. In examining images taken of Saturn's atmosphere over many months, imaging scientists found that the Dragon Storm arose in the same part of Saturn's atmosphere that had earlier produced large bright convective storms. In other words, the Dragon Storm appears to be a long-lived storm deep in the atmosphere that periodically flares up to produce dramatic bright white plumes which subside over time. One earlier sighting, in July 2004, was also associated with strong radio bursts. And another, observed in March 2004 and captured in a movie created from images of the atmosphere (http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA06082 and http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA06083) spawned three little dark oval storms that broke off from the arms of the main storm. Two of these subsequently merged with each other; the current to the north carried the third one off to the west, and Cassini lost track of it. Small dark storms like these generally get stretched out until they merge with the opposing currents to the north and south.
These little storms are the food that sustains the larger atmospheric features, including the larger ovals and the eastward and westward currents. If the little storms come from the giant thunderstorms, then together they form a food chain that harvests the energy of the deep atmosphere and helps maintain the powerful currents.
Cassini has many more chances to observe future flare-ups of the Dragon Storm, and others like it over the course of the mission. It is likely that scientists will come to solve the mystery of the radio bursts and observe storm creation and merging in the next 2 or 3 years.
Pandora's Flocks
June 17, 2005\tFull-Res: PIA07523
The shepherd moon, Pandora, is seen here alongside the narrow F ring that it helps maintain. Pandora is 84 kilometers (52 miles) across.
Cassini obtained this view from about four degrees above the ringplane. Captured here are several faint, dusty ringlets in the vicinity of the F ring core. The ringlets do not appear to be perturbed to the degree seen in the core.
The appearance of Pandora here is exciting, as the moon's complete shape can be seen, thanks to reflected light from Saturn, which illuminates Pandora's dark side. The hint of a crater is visible on the dark side of the moon.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 4, 2005, at a distance of approximately 967,000 kilometers (601,000 miles) from Pandora and at a Sun-Pandora-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 117 degrees. The image scale is 6 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel.
Other releases of late include:
ring plane
Debating whether to start a Deep Impact thread...
Are you an astronomy junky?
I have a 10" Meade LX200 GPS I play with.
Originally posted by talksense101
I have no grudge against your enthusiasm. But shouldn't we clean up our act on the one planet we live in before heading out to others? In the distant future, we might end up like locusts and leeches if we keep travelling from planet to planet just to consume it's resources.
What does that have to do with anything?
Originally posted by curiousuburb
Unspecified caption yet, but this is the sunlit side...
looks like the F Ring and gap to A Ring just bulging into the center left edge.
It seems to me we can see the lit lower crescent of a moon inside and above the F Ring.
You can also clearly see perturbations or 'wake' in the F ring, perhaps due to the nearby moon (Prometheus?).
This image was taken with the Wide Angle camera at a resolution of about 7km per pixel.
Detailed shots of the F ring wake at 700m per pixel will be available soon.
Images and briefing to come this morning.
I dont know about you but to me it sure looks like there are a bunch of moving objects all over that background.
Sparkling Saturn\t
\t\t
Saturn's rings light up with bright blue highlights, in this blend of both visual and X-ray observations.
Astronomers believe that fluorescence caused when solar X-rays smack into the oxygen molecules locked with in Saturn?s icy ring water.
As seen in this image, most of the X-rays among Saturn?s rings come from the B ring, the bright white, inner ring in the optical image of the planet.
There is some evidence for a concentration of X-rays on the morning side (left side, also called the East ansa) of the rings, possibly because X-rays are associated with optical features called spokes that are largely confined to the dense B ring and most often seen on the morning side.
Spokes are due to transient clouds of fine ice-dust particles that are lifted off the ring surface. It has been suggested that the spokes are triggered by meteoroid impacts, which are more likely in the midnight to early morning hours because during that period the relative speed of the rings through a cloud of meteoroids would be greater.
The higher X-ray brightness on the morning side of the rings could be due to the additional solar fluorescence from the transient ice clouds that produce the spokes. This explanation may also account for other Chandra observations of Saturn, which show that the X-ray brightness of the rings varies significantly from one week to the next.
Credit: X-ray: NASA/MSFC/CXC/A.Bhardwaj et al.; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI/AURA
They have previously reported on puzzling results from science in these bands and compared Chandra and HST
Chandra's image of Saturn held some surprises for the observers. First, Saturn's 90 megawatts of X-radiation is concentrated near the equator. This is different from a similar gaseous giant planet, Jupiter, where the most intense X-rays are associated with the strong magnetic field near its poles.
Credit: X-ray: NASA/U. Hamburg/J.Ness et al; Optical: NASA/STScI
check out the latest spooky Sounds of Saturn
Saturn's radio emissions could be mistaken for a Halloween sound track. That's how two researchers describe their recent findings, published in the July 23 issue of the Geophysical Research Letters. Their paper is based on data from the Cassini spacecraft radio and plasma wave science instrument. The study investigates sounds that are not just eerie, but also descriptive of a phenomenon similar to Earth's northern lights.
"All of the structures we observe in Saturn's radio spectrum are giving us clues about what might be going on in the source of the radio emissions above Saturn's auroras," said Dr. Bill Kurth, deputy principal investigator for the instrument. He is with the University of Iowa, Iowa City. Kurth made the discovery along with Principal Investigator Don Gurnett, a professor at the University. "We believe that the changing frequencies are related to tiny radio sources moving up and down along Saturn's magnetic field lines."
Samples of the resulting sounds can be heard at www.nasa.gov/cassini , http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/cassini/ .
The radio emissions, called Saturn kilometric radiation, are generated along with Saturn's auroras, or northern and southern lights. Because the Cassini instrument has higher resolution compared to a similar instrument on NASA's Voyager spacecraft, it has provided more detailed information on the spectrum and the variability of radio emissions. The high-resolution measurements allow scientists to convert the radio waves into audio recordings by shifting the frequencies down into the audio frequency range.
The terrestrial cousins of Saturn's radio emissions were first reported in 1979 by Gurnett, who used an instrument on the International Sun-Earth Explorer spacecraft in Earth orbit. Kurth said that despite their best efforts, scientists still haven't agreed on a theory to fully explain the phenomenon. They will get another chance to solve the radio emission puzzle beginning in mid-2008 when Cassini will fly close to, or possibly even through, the source region at Saturn. Gurnett said, "It is amazing that the radio emissions from Earth and Saturn sound so similar." Other contributors to the paper include University of Iowa scientists George Hospodarsky and Baptiste Cecconi; Mike Kaiser (currently at Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.); French scientists Philippe Louarn, Philippe Zarka and Alain Lecacheux; and Austrian scientists Helmut Rucker and Mohammed Boudjada. Cassini, carrying 12 scientific instruments, on June 30, 2004, became the first spacecraft to orbit Saturn. It is conducting a four-year study of the planet, its rings and many moons. The spacecraft carried the Huygens probe, a six-instrument European Space Agency probe that landed on Titan, Saturn's largest moon, in January 2005.
Click pic above for links to QT movie of Hyperion flyby.
Cassini performed back-to-back flybys of Saturn moons Tethys and Hyperion last weekend, coming closer than ever before to each of them. Tethys has a scarred, ancient surface, while Hyperion is a strange, spongy-looking body with dark-floored craters that speckle its surface.
False colour close-up of Tethys. Click for details
This view is among the closest Cassini images of Tethys' icy surface taken during the Sept. 24, 2005 flyby.
This false-color image, created with infrared, green and ultraviolet frames, reveals a wide variety of surface colors across this terrain. The presence of this variety at such small scales may indicate a mixture of different surface materials. Tethys was previously known to have color differences on its surface, especially on its trailing side, but this kind of color diversity is new to imaging scientists. For a clear-filter view of this terrain, see PIA07736.
Originally posted by Not Unlike Myself
You're really into this space stuff huh?
It's like a new world every day...
I mean, they keep finding more and more little moonlets. What's next, Charon finds out it has two little siblings?
One more plant, one more place you'll never see. And the kicker is.. none of this is new.. it's all been there long before we existed... and will continue to exist long after we are gone. So what if we see it?
It's like sensation 'freaks'. They live for the feeling of being alive. This seems almost the same. If the thrill is in the seeing.. does it really matter if you've seen a lot or seen a little? Because in the end.. you still dye...
So while we look to space for answers about who we are.. why we are here.. who or what else is 'out there'... I look inside and say what does all that abstract 'hypothesis' really matter? Most people struggle their whole lives just trying to figure out who *they themselves* are...
I dunno.. maybe I need prozac or something... (yeah yeah.. or something)