[Goober5000]

And what about those landers on Mars that are still going strong after a year?

[Tiara]

Originally posted by Liberator

Except the oceans are liquid nitrogen and atmosphere is methane, oh yeah and the surface temperature is about -250 degrees C.

Ermmm, I'm thinking you don't know much about how life starts on a plane.

4.2 billion years ago, when Earth came in to existence, the total amount of oxygen in the atmosphere was LESS then 1%. That's not very typical to say the least if you look to modern time Earth. But the initil lifeforms (single-celled organisms) didn't live on the same terms as we do.

Hydrogen, carbon dioxide, ammonia and methane gases, when heated with water and charged with electricity for 24 hours changed much of the carbon into organic compounds like sugars, amino acids, purines, and pyrimidines. Similar chemical reactions can occur on Tital as well.

I didn't say it was a carbon copy (no pun intended ) of Earth, I said it was very close to the conditions on Earth. Yes, some variables are different, but not in such a way that it would disallow the formation of living cells and eventually more complex organisms.

Ofcourse, we'll all be dead by the time this stuff all happens but it will give us a great insight on how life on Earth came into existence.

[Lynx]

-150° C prevent any formation of life no matter how close all the other conditiond are to early Earth.

[vyper]

Prevents formation of life you can think of.

[Lynx]

The temperature is so low that it slows down most chemical processes to a crawl and prevents others completely. Thus the formation of any life is incredibly unlikely.

[Liberator]

However, if we had the technology, we could import the methane for use in our motorcars.  However, if we could do that, would could build cloudscoops around Jupiter and import hydrogen from there at a far cheaper rate.

[Tiara]

Originally posted by Lynx
The temperature is so low that it slows down most chemical processes to a crawl and prevents others completely. Thus the formation of any life is incredibly unlikely.

Dude, do you not know how the sun grows in intensity? In a few billion years it'll be just as hot there as it is here on Earth.

Also, it's minus 178 degrees Celsius there. Not -250... And that's SURFACE temperature. Not to mention the planet is half water ice.

Ow and another nice fact for you to know; there are also trace amounts of at least a dozen organic compounds (like ethane, hydrogen cyanide, carbon dioxide). Boo-f'ing-ya!

As for Lynx, the very fact that there is a large thick smog like atmosphere proves that chemical reactions DO take place and in an even colder place then the surface too (the formation of the organic compound I posted above prove exactly the same).

[Ace]

A safe landing... a surprise considering NASA's recent track record:


Looks like it landed on land. However some of those descent images show what looks like a liquid ocean and rivers.

Of course it's liquid methane...



It would be awesome if there was life on Titan. It'd have to be a pretty different form of life though...

[Lynx]

Originally posted by Lynx
-150° C....

-178° it is only at the polar areas.

I didn't say that every chemical reaction is inhibited by the temperature, but only a few basic ones are relatively fast. There are other biological processes that work too, but they take days to weeks compared to fractions of seconds on earth. And the low temperatures inhibit in fact one of the most important processes for example it'd be too cold for even a basic cell membrane to build itself like  they are suspected to have been in the first earth organisms. As for the biological compounds found there they are so basic, they are still lightyears from any form of simple life, part of them can be found on comets, too.

As for the sun getting bigger as it get's older, it'll never get enough to do any significant changes to Titan, it'll rise a few °C at best, mostly compareable to Jupiters moons which still are damn cold.

[Liberator]

Life is much more likely on Europa.  If there is life anywhere else in the system, it will likely be there.

That said, Titan is very cool.  As in sweet, not temperature.

[IceFire]

Originally posted by Lynx


-178° it is only at the polar areas.

I didn't say that every chemical reaction is inhibited by the temperature, but only a few basic ones are relatively fast. There are other biological processes that work too, but they take days to weeks compared to fractions of seconds on earth. And the low temperatures inhibit in fact one of the most important processes for example it'd be too cold for even a basic cell membrane to build itself like  they are suspected to have been in the first earth organisms. As for the biological compounds found there they are so basic, they are still lightyears from any form of simple life, part of them can be found on comets, too.

As for the sun getting bigger as it get's older, it'll never get enough to do any significant changes to Titan, it'll rise a few °C at best, mostly compareable to Jupiters moons which still are damn cold.

It may be the case however that if there is any sort of thermal activity or the like that life has formed in small, hidden, hard to reach places.  Europa too...but Titan I imagine is a distinct possibility.

[aldo_14]

For all we know, life is most likely to be in the lower atmosphere of Jupiter.........

This is neat stuff, anyways; is Huygens still transmitting?  I thought I heard its batteries only lasted a few hours?

[Thorn]

Originally posted by Liberator
However, if we had the technology, we could import the methane for use in our motorcars.  However, if we could do that, would could build cloudscoops around Jupiter and import hydrogen from there at a far cheaper rate.

Actually, Titan would probably be cheaper. Jupiter's gravity would be a huge problem for getting anything into and out of orbit, not to mention keeping it from being pulled into the atmosphere and torn to shreds by the storms.

[Ace]

You don't really need to import methane, plenty of organisms can procude it.

However, harvesting gas giants and moons for reaction mass for stations, probes, ships, etc. will be a definate necessity in the future.

Heh... water barons

Anyways, from what it sounds like Huygen's mission is a very short one and will end or ended when Cassini goes down the horizon. It's next orbit of Titan is a few weeks from now, Huygen's battery will be long dead. That is unless the Titanians decide to upgrade it with "nukuler" weapons to blow Earth up before Bush invades Titan for the hydrocarbons

[Liberator]

They send a 50 million dollar probe into space with enough power to run for a few hours?  And you talk about how wasteful my government is?

I wonder why they didn't use a radiological power source?  Not nuclear, radiological, like all the deep space probes we've ever launched.  The damn things were still providing power 10-15 years after they launched and they're safe enough you could put on in your car.  The key, I guess, is amount, most radiological cells can only do a few hundred watts an hour.

[Thorn]

Originally posted by Liberator
They send a 50 million dollar probe into space with enough power to run for a few hours?  And you talk about how wasteful my government is?

I wonder why they didn't use a radiological power source?  Not nuclear, radiological, like all the deep space probes we've ever launched.  The damn things were still providing power 10-15 years after they launched and they're safe enough you could put on in your car.  The key, I guess, is amount, most radiological cells can only do a few hundred watts an hour.

Try and remember when this thing was launched.

[Carl]

Originally posted by diamondgeezer
Huygens > Your space probe

ummm no. i'm sorry, but my space probe >*

[Ace]

Originally posted by Liberator
I wonder why they didn't use a radiological power source?  Not nuclear, radiological, like all the deep space probes we've ever launched.  The damn things were still providing power 10-15 years after they launched and they're safe enough you could put on in your car.  The key, I guess, is amount, most radiological cells can only do a few hundred watts an hour.

Typical response.

...and typical lack of understanding of the velocities of the objects involved, how radio behaves, etc.

Huygens was designed to operate for as long as Cassini would be in range, and designed to do a whole lot of work in that short timeframe.

It will be *weeks* before Cassini does another close sweep to receive radio signals from Huygens for a few hours.

The velocities involved means that there's doppeler effects, which were underestimated and led to the deployment date being changed. These effects mean that the window of opportunity to receive data is even narrower than originally thought.

Pretty much, Huygen's powerplant is the way it is because the mission designers knew that receiving further data from the probe would be very iffy.

They were in a similar situation as the folks designing the Mariner landers.

Now, if Cassini was a mission that actually orbited Titan and not the whole Saturnian system then it'd be able to receive the data that a long term lander would have.

People seem to have a hard time grasping the distances involved, how slow the speed of light actually is, the adjustments needed, etc. to get something like this to work right. Especially in a situation such as a high speed orbit around a gas giant with a few passes and trying to get data from a lander on a fixed spot.

However, I'm sure Liberator complained that the probe launched from Galileo into Jupiter was a waste because it was designed to measure the atmosphere and find the crush depth. It's obviously a waste of money if it doesn't last 12 years. Just like Huygens was designed for atmospheric tests and some perliminary looks at the surface to confirm readings taken from the flybys. Keep in mind, this probe was designed for a lot of worst-case scenarios of what Titan would be like. It wasn't custom-tailored for further exploration like the current crop of Mars landers.

[Liberator]

Obviously, nothing.  The difference was that Saturn is almost twice as far as Jupiter is and the odds of getting another lander in as interesting a place Titan in a reasonable amount of time is virtually nonexistant.  

They should've designed the bloody thing to transmit directly to Earth and been done with it.  You design a thing to do it's job alone, by itself, or you don't design it at all.  The relay to Cassini should have been a backup.  

Also, the probe that went into Jupiter was a lot simpler than Huygens since it was single purpose and very small.  Huygens was a large part of the Cassini mission.

Basically, I hate this minimalist bull****e design ethos that dominates space agencies these days.  If you're not going to send a man, you MUST build a robot to act as his proxy.  This means that it must be able to perform ALL the experiments a man would if he was there and report back ALL the data that a man would collect from said experiments.  And above all, you don't send a damn probe with a dozen sensors 25 AU away with enough power to operate for 4 damn hours, it's a waste.

[diamondgeezer]

Nor do you sink all your money in to your first mission to a location. Think about the increased sophistication in the Lunar, Venusian and Martian landings. You simply can't just gamble half your budget - what if Huygens had survived three seconds? We'd know not to bother sending another one, without obscene ammounts of waste.

Now, who's for sending a rover with orbiter? Power source will be an arse, but **** it, I like rovers

__________________
Diamond Geezer could beat ZylonBane in a fight