[BRIEF NOTE] Cassini-Huygens at Work
Aug. 30th, 2005 08:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI really should visit the homepage of the Cassini-Huygens Saturn mission more often. A joint venture of NASA, the ESA, and the Italian Space Agency, Cassini-Huygens aims to do for the Saturn system what the Galileo probe did for Jupiter, save with better technology. The discoveries to date have been remarkable. Among other things, we now know that there is no global hydrocarbon ocean on Titan and that there is a subsurface water ocean on Enceladus.
This photomontage, illustrating the size of Enceladus, is impossible. If Enceladus was somehow transported to pose of a photo, it would be well inside Earth's Roche limit. If not returned to its homeland, the moon, shortly break up into a dense low-orbiting ring of icy debris that would shortly rain down on the unprotected surface of the Earth. Enceladus matters. It's a small world, true, with a diameter comparable to the north-south axis of the United Kingdom. On the other hand, the United Kingdom is a big country, and we've barely begun to explore Enceladus. This is exciting.
Manned space exploration is likely to remain uneconomic for a good long while. This does depress me a bit, since the idea of being a tourist visiting (say) a partially-terraformed Mars or the Triton outposts appeals. These dreams were likely fantasies, unrealizable in my lifetime with the technologies and the moneys that Earth is likely to have. The pictures that we get beamed back from the outer realms of the Solar System are good enough for me, though I do wish we had more and better pictures. Hopefully we will in the not too distant future.
This photomontage, illustrating the size of Enceladus, is impossible. If Enceladus was somehow transported to pose of a photo, it would be well inside Earth's Roche limit. If not returned to its homeland, the moon, shortly break up into a dense low-orbiting ring of icy debris that would shortly rain down on the unprotected surface of the Earth. Enceladus matters. It's a small world, true, with a diameter comparable to the north-south axis of the United Kingdom. On the other hand, the United Kingdom is a big country, and we've barely begun to explore Enceladus. This is exciting.
Manned space exploration is likely to remain uneconomic for a good long while. This does depress me a bit, since the idea of being a tourist visiting (say) a partially-terraformed Mars or the Triton outposts appeals. These dreams were likely fantasies, unrealizable in my lifetime with the technologies and the moneys that Earth is likely to have. The pictures that we get beamed back from the outer realms of the Solar System are good enough for me, though I do wish we had more and better pictures. Hopefully we will in the not too distant future.
