15 June 2004

Saturn's moons

Here's a painfully geeky but very sincere review of the recent photos from the Cassini probe. It's getting blurry photos of Titan now:

If present-day Titan could be warmed enough to melt its icy exterior, its atmosphere would bear a striking resemblance to that of early Earth, billions of years ago, prior to the emergence of life. Might Titan be a frozen, pre-biotic Earth, telling a tale littered with clues to the origins of terrestrial life long ago?

The past several day it was taking very stunning photos of Phoebe.

NASA's got the lowdown on the Cassini-Huygens mission, launched almost seven years ago on October 15th, 1997. The timeline tells us what's coming up next (Saturn, then a close visit to Titan in October).

Saturn has 30 named moons and many more just flying around anonymously. Man, I'm both a geek and old--I remember when I could name all of the moons of Saturn, and I'm sure it was less than 10 or so.

[ posted by sstrader on 15 June 2004 at 1:19:55 PM in Science & Technology ]