What's missing from this discussion, and so far as I can see from any proposal site discussions on this mission, is how to get the data back from the probe! If this is going to be a lander without an orbiter, you have a SERIOUS problem of how to get data back to earth. We talked about this very topic 5 years ago here after Huygens landed. People are going to want high-res images, audio and at least some video in addition to all the other basic science data from this mission. That is a HUGE amount of information to get back to earth from a billion miles out, while floating on a lake of CH4 under a thick atmosphere. The Huygens probe had 2 redundant, 8 watt, medium gain (partially directional) on board radio transmitters that sent all the data from the probe through the Cassini orbiter relay system. It took VLBI aperture synthesis, simultaneously using ~20 of some of the largest radio telescopes around the world JUST TO HEAR THE CARRIER SIGNAL of Huygens as it descended on Titan. We couldn't get any actual data directly from Huygens, we couldn't hear modulation of the signal clearly from that far away.

Huygens had a power budget from its NaS batteries of ~250W, you're not going to do much better than that with a sterling radioisotope generator for this proposed mission. So you have maybe 20W of radio power to use on this mission in order to get all your data back from Titan, you NEED to use a directional (high gain) antenna to do that. How the hell do you accurately and consistently point a high gain antenna directly at earth when rotating and bobbing around wildly while floating over the waves of a Titanian lake?!

"Just because one researcher commits the "biggest fraud in physics in the last 50 years" that happens to involve transistors doesn't mean all such research is fradulent and there is no reason at all from your link to be more skeptical than normal about this research."

Ahhh, a swing and miss, I felt the wind from that one though! I'm afraid that you (and the schizophrenic raving lunatic AC responding just before you) are making rather unwarranted assumptions about my comment. I never suggested "all such research is fradulent [sic]". I am suggesting that in a field where the science is currently progressing at breakneck speed and is consequently ferociously competitive, at the absolute cutting edge of the cutting edge of materials science and single atom manipulation, a breakthrough discovery as important and consequential as this needs to demonstrate replicability before the provisional acceptance warranted by the evidence in this paper alone can be elevated to the level of confident belief in the phenomenon being demonstrated. So yes, there is rational reason to be a little "more skeptical than normal about this research" because extraordinary claims require demonstration of a commensurate (ie. more than normal) level of extraordinary evidence in their favor before being accepted as solid fact. This is how science and rational skepticism works. Trust, but verify.

Notice that this discovery was NOT published in Nature. Wonder why? Here's why: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Hendrik_Sch%C3%B6n . Stay skeptical, wait for replication.

You seriously need to get a life. Like, bad. Posting absurdly long winded pseudoscience apologia on slashdot because a skeptic here once offended one of your delicate irrational beliefs is incredibly pathetic. Elaborate troll is elaborate.

mhmmm old news http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b7siH1Ausc

You are obviously completely clueless and wrong. Doppler shift speed measurement is present in ALL off the shelf GPS chips now sold. Maybe check next time before posting and making a fool of yourself.

http://nujournal.net/HighAccuracySpeed.pdf

http://www.locosystech.com/product.php?id=5&zln=en

um no. But it does seem "these days" that more and more people who, despite obviously knowing fuck all about science or how evidence bound scientific inquiry functions, nonetheless feel entitled to pontificate endlessly on whatever heavily scientifically related subject they like in total blissful, laughable ignorance.

oh I think that's him alright. I accidentally replied to someone below posting the same link first and ....WOW I literally loled when that picture popped up.

lololooooooooooollllll oh my fucking god, you win the internets sir! that is HILARIOUS. Mod above up.

You want me to believe a wildly high superconductor Tc claim using a link to a shady website that looks like it was designed in 1996, without any link to a paper or an author, without any reference to where the discovery was made, without any notes about secondary confirmation, without any other reference in the media except one lamo blog and without any real formal publication at all? Here's what every physicist reading this article right now is thinking: STFU. If you get a near room temp Tc superconductor working, you better be on the front page of a rushed to print edition of Nature that someone just ran down the hall to shove in my hand, or I'm not even going to give you the time of day.

FYI Slashdot, one of this decade's genuine breakthroughs in science has been finally breaking the diffraction limit for visible light microscopy. The results in the past couple years alone have been nothing short of stunning. Specifically the techniques which are capable of doing this are confocal microscopy, near-field scanning microscopy, stimulated emission depletion microscopy, stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy and structured illumination microscopy. All of these techniques use visible light and can image at below the diffraction limit of ~250nm resolution, but most use complicated techniques using lasers etc. to do so. Except that last one, structured illumination. This technology is going to literally revolutionize microscopy and probably biology as a whole in the coming years. It is a very clever technique and produces unbefuckingleivably amazing images. With it, full 3D reconstructions of individual living cells with ~10 nanometer resolution, at frame rates in the several Hz range can be taken using a relatively simple LCD retrofit to a high quality transmission light microscope which is installed between the light source and the stage. Look at some of these movies taken of cell processes using the technique and try to keep your jaw off the floor. While the resolution may be higher, none of this is possible with SEM or TEMs due to the necessity of imaging in vacuo.

not really, no. Satellite radar altimetry is just simple time domain reflectometry. Send a pulse of light, microwaves, whatever and use the elapsed time (along with knowledge of the speed of light) until hearing the echo to determine distance, subtract ephemeris data describing the satellite's orbit and get alitmetry out. Done. That is not at all what is being done here. So far as I know, there is no way of directly measuring snow depth from a satellite. If you're in orbit at 400 miles up trying to measure snowpack with even a ridiculously huge +/-1 foot accuracy, you're going to need less than 0.5ppm precision measurements on your reflectometry time - I have to think that the atmospheric-transit pulse broadening alone would smear that type of precision to hell, even with LIDAR. No, this technique uses a very clever, much more nuanced method to detect snow depth. They're modeling multi-path reflections of GPS signals off the ground using knowledge of the dielectric constant and surface roughness of the material being reflected off of, and the satellite elevation angle and antenna gain profile of the receiver, among other things, to model the effects of snow cover on signal to noise ratio, which is directly measurable by the GPS reciever. It's really a very solid piece of work http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009GL039430.shtml . We already have the SNOTEL network of meteorology and snow depth detection stations in the western US, which is made up of several hundred individual sites. However, while SNOTEL is a large system (really a gorgeously designed piece of parsimonious engineering if you ask me - small solar powered stations sitting out in the middle of nowhere patiently listen for reflections of radio waves off of meteors in the upper atmosphere, and upon hearing them, send a quick burst of the day's collected data out, which reflects off of the few-second-lived plasma tail of the burnt-up meteoroid, which is then detected by a central ground station in Boise. fantastic!) but the US is BIG, and getting more accurate detailed maps of snow cover over larger areas using already in place equipment is a very cute trick that could have important implications for monitoring, for instance, global warming effects over long periods of time.

The thing that is 'already obvious to others' is that you are a pretentious dolt with vainglorious delusions and a gross ignorance of the existence of confirmation bias.