Cassini to make important fly by of Enceladus this weekend

Enceladus has recently become my favorite object in the solar system. The tiny, icy moon of Saturn has revealed so many surprises in just the last few years, and I'd wager it's got a few more shockers in store.



The moon of Saturn, once believed to be cold and dead, has become one of the strongest candidates to harbor extraterrestrial life that we know of. Small bodies without atmospheres at this distance from the sun are usually dead, yet something very interesting is going on under the ice of Enceladus' south pole. Cassini should be able to tell us a lot more on its next pass, coming up November 30th. Universe today has a better write up about it than I could manage, so check that out for details.

Here's the short story: it appears that a combination of tidal heating caused by the pull of Saturn and other moons combined with radioactive heating in Enceladus' core might be sustaining a subsurface ocean of liquid, salty water. The great thing about Enceladus compared to the other potential habitable sites in the solar system is that Enceladus is spewing the evidence right into space, in the form of geysers erupting from the south pole. The plumes from these geysers achieve amazing speeds of over a 1,300 miles an hour, easily fast enough to escape and contribute to Saturns E ring. Cassini has already flown through the plumes several times and analyzed their content, revealing lots of H20, salt, and ammonia, but the each flyby reveals more and more about the subsurface world of Enceladus.

Cassini's latest flyby will once again use spectrometry to analyze the content of the plumes, as well as radio instruments to help understand the gravitational dynamics of the tiny moon, perhaps leading to a better picture of the subsurface oceans. Determining the composition of the plumes will tell us a lot about what kind of heating mechanisms need to be involved. For instance, a high ammonia content would greatly lower the melting temperature of water and thus less heat would be needed to sustain a liquid ocean.

Keep in mind that Cassini was not designed to probe for signs of life on Enceladus, but what it finds might just coax NASA into designing a specific mission.

What I really love about Enceladus is how it has forced us to rethink habitable zones. Even if Enceladus doesn't have life in its subsurface oceans, the fact remains that the mechanisms exist to support life on cold, icy moons and planets. If tidal heating combined with the natural radioactive heating (found in the core of most planets) is enough to sustain a liquid ocean, what's to stop us from considering even extrasolar planets as harbingers of life, i.e. rogue planetary systems adrift in space, not orbiting any star?

The more we look, the more hospitable the universe seems!

Missile launch probably just a plane

As should be expected, Michio Kaku gets it right on CNN. Wired's Noah Shachtman also has a good write-up debunking this one.

After seeing video of the so-called California missile launch, I immediately thought it was a plane. Unfortunately, I changed my mind when news reports mentioned that NORAD and the Military were investigating the 'event'. Because news reports indicated the Military brass were referring to this as 'an event', I assumed there must be some sort of colluding evidence, radar data in particular, to support the contrail as rocket theory.

Now I'm kicking myself for not doing a smidge more research and being able to call this one as bullshit immediately.

Yet another example of the power of suggestion, and, for me and I suspect many others, the power of the x-files effect. It's so much more fun to imagine a rogue group sneaking out to sea, launching a clandestine satellite into orbit. So much fun that you want to believe, even though a much simpler and mundane explanation usually exists. Being a skeptic can be a buzzkill.

As an amusing side note, this whole ordeal showed up in my dreams last night as a prelude to some kind of Red Bull stunt. How awesome would rocket-flugtag be?

Edit: I originally referred to this as an example of the power of suggestion. While out walking the dogs it occurred to me that this is an imprecise phrase carrying a lot of hypnosis-baggage. So I did some research into apophenia and pareidolia related ideas but I'm having a hard time finding the right term for what I'm thinking of here. One would think the field of psychology would have coined an apt term for the process of being misled by the framing of an issue. Think of the verbage involved, news stories all referred to a 'launch', and the military is investigating a 'launch event'. Indeed I think the journalistic sense of the term 'framing' comes closest to what I'm getting at here.

Animation of Hartley 2 flyby

When the Deep Impact probe finishes taking images of comet Hartley 2 in a few weeks, it will have made some 120,000 images of the comet. Yet from just the first five images released of the close-up flyby, Daniel Macháček created a very nice animation of the flyby. Animation is almost the wrong word here, because it conjures up the idea of something being drawn, instead, Macháček used the actual images and software to put the flyby into action.




From the youtube page, "Daniel Macháček created this smooth animation from the five images of Hartley 2 released by the Deep Impact team immediately following its flyby on November 4, 2010. He used Squirlz Morph. Time in the animation is five times faster than the actual speed of the flyby."

The part that fascinates me about this animation is the timespan involved. This animation is only accelerated five times. In other words, this video in real time would run just over three minutes, which isn't that long.

Because of the scales involved in space exploration, I imagine events like this taking hours or days. That this glimpse of the flyby involves only a few minutes shows just how close we came to Hartley 2.

This is another one of those moments when it strikes me just how tangible space exploration can be. We're a strange species, humans. We took little bits of rock, broke them down and refined them into their elemental parts; aluminum, titanium, magnesium, carbon, silicon; assembled these bits of rock into a brilliant design, placed on top of a semi-controlled bomb of liquid oxygen and lamp fuel (kerosene, more or less), and blasted it into the depths of space on a trajectory calculated with the equations of an alchemist and occultist who lived 250 years ago, to visit another bit of rock floating in space, trying to learn how those elemental pieces came to form our own floating speck and the solar system as a whole.

And I wouldn't have it any other way.