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Mars Base

Full Titanic site mapped for 1st time - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...-03-full-titanic-site-1st.html

scibyte37 Titantic

shared by Mars Base on 09 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • April 10, 1912 file photo, the Luxury liner Titanic departs Southampton, England
  • Researchers have pieced together what's believed to be the first comprehensive map of the entire 3-by-5-mile Titanic debris field
  • Marks on the muddy ocean bottom suggest, for instance, that the stern rotated like a helicopter blade as the ship sank, rather than plunging straight down
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • sonar imaging and more than 100,000 photos taken from underwater robots to create the map
  • Explorers of the Titanic
  • have known for more than 25 years where the bow and stern landed
  • previous maps of the floor around the wreckage were incomplete
  • mapping took place in the summer of 2010 during an expedition to the Titanic led by RMS Titanic Inc., the legal custodian of the wreck
  • joined by other groups, as well as the cable History channel
  • Details on the new findings
  • are not being revealed yet
  • the network will air them in a two-hour documentary on April 15, exactly 100 years after the Titanic sank
  • high-resolution photos - 130,000 of them in all
  • self-controlled robots known
  • along the ocean bottom day and night
  • moving at a little more than 3 miles per hour as they traversed back and forth in a grid along the bottom
  • photos were stitched together on a computer to provide a detailed photo mosaic of the debris
  • layout of the wreck site and where the pieces landed provide new clues on exactly what happened
  • Computer simulations will re-enact the sinking in reverse, bringing the wreckage debris back to the surface and reassembled
Mars Base

Saturn Moon Titan May Hide Buried Ocean | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/8-titan-ocean-saturn-moon.html

scibyte53 titan

shared by Mars Base on 28 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • The best evidence yet for a liquid ocean buried under the surface of Saturn's moon Titan has been found
  • New observations show that Titan warps during the gravitational tides
  • suggesting an ocean sloshes under its outer shell
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • long been theorized but never confirmed
  • larger than the planet Mercury
  • biggest of the
  • moons orbiting Saturn
  • By monitoring how Cassini's acceleration changed during six close flybys past Titan between 2006 and 2011
Mars Base

The iceberg's accomplice: Did the moon sink the Titanic? - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...s-accomplice-moon-titanic.html

scibyte37

shared by Mars Base on 07 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • The iceberg’s accomplice: Did the moon sink the Titanic?
  • suggested that an unusually close approach by the moon on Jan. 4, 1912, may have caused abnormally high tides
  • moon and sun had lined up in such a way their gravitational pulls enhanced each other
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • once-in-many-lifetimes event occurred on that Jan. 4
  • Where did the killer iceberg come from
  • ultimate cause of the accident was that the ship struck an iceberg
  • well-known as a “spring tide
  • moon’s perigee—closest approach to Earth—proved to be its closest in 1,400 years, and came within six minutes of a full moon
  • Earth’s perihelion—closest approach to the sun—happened the day before
  • the odds of all these variables lining up in just the way they did were, well, astronomical.
  • this configuration maximized the moon’s tide-raising forces on Earth’s oceans
  • researchers looked to see if the enhanced tides caused increased glacial calving
  • to reach the shipping lanes by April
  • any icebergs breaking off the Greenland glaciers in Jan. 1912 would have to move unusually fast and against prevailing currents
  • the answer lies in grounded and stranded icebergs
  • icebergs travel southward, many become stuck in the shallow waters off the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland
  • Normally, icebergs remain in place and cannot resume moving southward until they’ve melted enough to refloat or a high enough tide frees them
  • single iceberg can become stuck multiple times on its journey southward, a process that can take several years
  • unusually high tide in Jan. 1912 would have been enough to dislodge many of those icebergs and move them back into the southbound ocean currents
  • they would have just enough time to reach the shipping lanes for that fateful encounter with the Titanic.
  • But an extremely high spring tide could refloat them
  • ebb tide would carry them back out
  • where the icebergs would resume drifting southward
  • could explain the abundant icebergs in the spring of 1912
  • Mars Base on 07 Mar 12
     
    d Russell Doescher, along with Roger Sinnott, senior contributing editor at Sky & Telescope magazine, publish their findings in the April 2012 edition of Sky & Telescope, on newsstands now. "Of course, the ultimate cause of the accident was that the ship struck an iceberg. The Titanic failed to slow down, even after having received several wireless messages warning of ice ahead," Olson said. "They went full speed into a region with icebergs-that's really what sank the
Mars Base

Rare Rain on Titan; Once Every 1,000 Years - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...on-titan-once-every-1000-years

scibyte40 titan

shared by Mars Base on 27 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • According to data gathered by NASA’s Cassini mission, parts of Titan might not see rain for more than 1,000 years.
  • there are lakes and rivers of liquid hydrocarbons on the surface
  • the rains that feed them may come few and far between
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • surface temperatures plunge to -179C
  • hydrological cycle runs with methane: methane lakes, methane rivers, and methane rain
  • In all of its observations of Titan, Cassini only spotted two instances of darkened regions that might have indicated rainfall.
Mars Base

NASA Finds Ingredient for Plastic on Saturn's Moon Titan | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/-titan-plastic-ingredient.html

scibyte105 ViewerFeedback titan

shared by Mars Base on 05 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • a chemical essential for the creation of plastic on Earth has been found in
  • Saturn's largest Titan
  • NASA's Cassini spacecraft currently orbiting Saturn, found that the atmosphere of Titan contains propylene
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • key ingredient of plastic containers, car bumpers and other everyday items on Earth
  • strung together in long chains to form a plastic called polypropylene
  • Scientists used Cassini's composite infrared spectrometer (CIRS) instrument, which measures infrared light given off by Saturn and its moon, made the discovery
  • When Voyager 1 conducted the first close flyby of the moon in 1980, it recognized gasses in the moon's brown atmosphere as hydrocarbons.
  • measurement was very difficult to make because propylene's weak signature is crowded by related chemicals with much stronger signals
Mars Base

Titan's Haze Is Dropping - Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...Titans_haze_is_dropping

scibyte39 titan

shared by Mars Base on 21 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • sky is falling on Titan
  • shroud has plunged more than 100 kilometers since the Cassini spacecraft whizzed by in 2004
  • suggesting that shifting seasons can do more than dump rain
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • hazy layer that hovered 500 kilometers
  • sunk to an altitude of around 360 kilometers
  • One year on Titan is the equivalent of nearly 30 years on Earth
  • one Titan year after Voyager, the moon looks more or less as it did in 1981
  • Cassini first swung by in 2004, the haze had ballooned outward and covered the entire moon except for the wintry north pole vortex
  • , as winter comes to the south, the haze is shrinking, and images snapped by Cassini in late February reveal the beginnings of a vortex at the south pole
Mars Base

Ocean on Saturn moon could be as salty as the Dead Sea - 0 views

phys.org/...an-saturn-moon-salty-dead.html

scibyte135 cassini titan

shared by Mars Base on 05 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Scientists analyzing data from NASA's Cassini mission have firm evidence the ocean inside Saturn's largest moon, Titan, might be as salty as the Earth's Dead Sea.
  • The new results come from a study of gravity and topography data collected during Cassini's repeated flybys of Titan during the past 10 years
  • Using the Cassini data, researchers presented a model structure for Titan, resulting in an improved understanding of the structure of the moon's outer ice shell
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Additional findings support previous indications the moon's icy shell is rigid and in the process of freezing solid
  • Researchers found that a relatively high density was required for Titan's ocean in order to explain the gravity data
  • This indicates the ocean is probably an extremely salty brine of water mixed with dissolved salts likely composed of sulfur, sodium and potassium
  • The density indicated for this brine would give the ocean a salt content roughly equal to the saltiest bodies of water on Earth
  • Giuseppe Mitri of the University of Nantes in France
  • "Knowing this may change the way we view this ocean as a possible abode for present-day life, but conditions might have been very different there in the past."
  • Cassini data also indicate the thickness of Titan's ice crust varies slightly from place to place.
  • The researchers said this can best be explained if the moon's outer shell is stiff, as would be the case if the ocean were slowly crystalizing, and turning to ice.
  • A further consequence of a rigid ice shell, according to the study, is any outgassing of methane into Titan's atmosphere must happen at scattered "hot spots"—like the hot spot on Earth that gave rise to the Hawaiian Island chain
  • Titan's methane does not appear to result from convection or plate tectonics recycling its ice shell.
  • How methane gets into the moon's atmosphere has long been of great interest to researchers, as molecules of this gas are broken apart by sunlight on short geological timescales
  • Titan's present atmosphere contains about five percent methane. This means some process, thought to be geological in nature, must be replenishing the gas
  • "Our work suggests looking for signs of methane outgassing will be difficult with Cassini, and may require a future mission that can find localized methane sources," said Jonathan Lunine, a scientist on the Cassini mission at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
Mars Base

Titan's Tides Suggest a Subsurface Sea - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...tides-suggest-a-subsurface-sea

scibyte53 titan

shared by Mars Base on 28 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • s tidal flexing
  • mostly composed of rock, the flexing would be in the neighborhood of around 3 feet (1 meter.)
  • measurements taken by the Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn since 2004, Titan exhibits much more intense flexing — ten times more, in fact, as much as 30 feet (10 meters
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • the presence of such an ocean — possibly containing trace amounts of ammonia – would help explain how methane gets replenished into the moon’s thick atmosphere.
Mars Base

Lake on Saturn's Largest Moon May Have Waves - Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...-s-largest-moon-may-have-waves

scibyte134 titan

shared by Mars Base on 05 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • meras on NASA's spacecraft Cassini recently saw what appear to be waves on one of Titan's largest methane lakes
  • a signal scientists have long searched for but never found
  • If confirmed, the discovery would mark the first time waves have been seen outside Earth.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • team found patterns in the sunlight reflecting off a northern lake called Punga Mare that they interpret as two-centimeter-high waves
  • There
  • may be a mudflat instead of a deep lake, and a shallow film of liquid on top may be the cause of the unique light signature
  • If life on Titan exists,
  • the best place to look
  • is in large bodies of liquid—the kind that form waves
  • Waves on Titan
  • would confirm that the lakes actually are deep reservoirs of methane and ethane,
  • True liquid bodies would also make a robotic spacecraft mission to explore Titan's habitability more feasible
  • By 2017 scientists should know for certain whether what they are seeing is indeed caused by waves
  • Cassini has been observing the moon during its northern winter, when weak winds are at work
  • As spring
  • over the next few years, bringing stronger winds to kick up seas, the probe should capture more definitive evidence of waves if they exist
Mars Base

James Cameron reshoots Titanic scene - Telegraph - 0 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...on-reshoots-Titanic-scene.html

scibyte41 Titantic

shared by Mars Base on 05 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • expert Neil deGrasse Tyson sent him a “snarky” email.
Mars Base

Self-Propelled Floating Robot Navigates an Arizona Lake | Space Exploration | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/ot-navigates-arizona-lake.html

scibyte39 robot MarMedia

shared by Mars Base on 21 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • floating robot made to land on a lake, propel itself around and gather data about the water and atmosphere as it goes
  • built it for future lake-landing missions to one of Saturn's moons, Titan.
  • could also be used for science and military missions on Earth,
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • weighs about 100 pounds,
  • In the video, the robot turns some circles and navigates on the lake's surface.
  • can carry 150 pounds' worth of sensing equipment
  • can be controlled from anywhere around the world using an Internet connection
  • working on making the craft more autonomous
  • wants to create data-gathering robots that have a sense of curiosity
  • investigate certain places, learn from what they find and use that information to decide what to explore next. 
  • an improved version
  • could help officials survey the cleanup of dangerously polluted water in munitions dumps and mines
  • also could help ocean scientists gather data about currents and pollution.
  • For a mission to Titan
  • NASA is interested in rovers that can land on liquid rather than on solid ground
Mars Base

James Cameron Corrects Astronomy Mistake in 'Titanic' | Neil deGrasse Tyson | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/anic-astronomy-correction.html

scibyte41 cameron Titantic

shared by Mars Base on 04 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Cameron has addressed Tyson's criticism that the incorrect star field was used during one of the film's most famous scenes.
  • when Rose (Kate Winslet) is lying on the piece of driftwood and staring up at the stars, that is not the star field she would have seen,"
  • There is only one sky she should have been looking at ... and it was the wrong sky! Worse than that, it was not only the wrong sky; the left-half of the sky was a mirror reflection of the right-half of the sky
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • send me the right stars for that exact time and I'll put it in the movie
  • Tyson did just that and the correct star field has been included in the re-release.
Mars Base

Surprising Swirls Above Titan's South Pole - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...swirls-above-titans-south-pole

GrabBag TitanVortex

shared by Mars Base on 11 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • new vantage point granted by its inclined orbit researchers have gotten a new look at the south pole of Titan
  • We suspect that this maelstrom, clearly forming now over the south pole and spinning more than forty times faster than the moon’s solid body, may be a harbinger of what will ultimately become a south polar hood as autumn there turns to winter.  Of course, only time will tell.
Mars Base

Strange Vortex On Saturn Moon Titan | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/n-moon-titan-polar-vortex.html

GrabBag TitanVortex

shared by Mars Base on 11 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Cassini scientists will keep a close eye on Titan's south pole for further developments, which could shed light on the moon's complex, methane-based weather system
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