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Comment Re:What apps? (Score 2) 55

The problem is that is a planetarium app. There are plenty of those in the app store. I particularly like SkySafari Pro. It's expensive but excellent. No, what I want is Celestia, which I use more to see what Cassini is up to at any given time, since I have Celestia set up on my desktop to show its position and its orientation (from knowledge of where the instruments are on the spacecraft, you can then see where the cameras are pointed at any given time). Putting yourself at Cassini's position also gives you an interactive way of looking how far away Saturn or Titan are at any given moment.

Comment Been using it since the fork (Score 1) 242

I've had LibreOffice installed on my laptop ever since I bought it last year. I typically use MS Office but I really didn't feel like paying for yet ANOTHER licence of it in addition to the one on my desktop. LibreOffice has been pretty solid for me over this past year, though I wish it had better support for DOCX...

Comment Re:Weather (Score 1) 110

We can't make reliable weather forecasts for Titan either... But at least we have an excuse, we've only observed Titan's weather patterns from the Titan equivalent of mid-December (when Earth-based observations of sufficient resolution began in 2002) to the equivalent of early- to mid-April (where we are now). And even then the data set (even from Cassini) is pretty sporadic. But I do have one reliable way of knowing when there won't be clouds on Titan. Acquire images of it with an observation with the word "CLOUD" in it, like ISS_147TI_CLOUD002_PRIME

Comment Re:Meh, I've seen bigger... (Score 1) 109

Sorry, this was a bit of an inside joke. I am a planetary geologist, so yes, it is pretty interesting when we can add another large impact basin to the ones we can study right here on Earth.

The joke comes from the first time I went on a field trip to Meteor Crater east of Flagstaff, Arizona. Because I've done some work on the eroded impact craters of Titan, all I said was "Meh, I've seen bigger" because all the crater on Titan are bigger than the mile-wide Barringer crater.

Comment Re:It's not just hardware (Score 4, Interesting) 184

It also affects proposals to NASA that have ANY international collaborators. When sending out various drafts, we have either ITAR-safe or ITAR-unsafe versions because foreign citizens not working in the US are not allowed to even read vague descriptions of hardware, let alone have the hardware. So for the ITAR-safe version, whole sections of the proposal have to be removed for the safety of our foreign collaborators. After all, if you know how to build a [redacted for your safety], you must be a terrorist...
NASA

Hints of Life Found On Saturn's Moon Titan 227

Calopteryx writes "New Scientist reports that in 2005, researchers predicted two potential signatures of life on Titan. Now, thanks to research done with the help of the Cassini spacecraft, both have been seen, although non-biological chemical reactions could also be behind the observations. NASA's writeup has further details: 'One key finding comes from a paper online now in the journal Icarus [abstract] that shows hydrogen molecules flowing down through Titan's atmosphere and disappearing at the surface. Another paper online now in the Journal of Geophysical Research maps hydrocarbons on the Titan surface and finds a lack of acetylene. This lack of acetylene is important because that chemical would likely be the best energy source for a methane-based life on Titan, said Chris McKay, an astrobiologist at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., who proposed a set of conditions necessary for this kind of methane-based life on Titan in 2005. One interpretation of the acetylene data is that the hydrocarbon is being consumed as food. But McKay said the flow of hydrogen is even more critical because all of their proposed mechanisms involved the consumption of hydrogen.'"
Space

Impact On Jupiter Observed By Amateur Astronomers 53

Omomyid and other readers send in the news that the bright flash of an impact on Jupiter has been observed — and caught on film — by amateur astronomers. That WMV is from amateur Christopher Go. Here's Anthony Wesley's video (45 MB AVI; the site is already overloaded). In the larger video you can see the impact lasting for a couple of seconds, and a good deal of structure is visible. The amateurs report that no dark debris field developed around the impact site in the time before it rotated out of sight; this may indicate that the impactor burned up high in Jupiter's atmosphere. Soon professional astronomers, and possibly Hubble, will be on the job.
Space

Submission + - New Evidence for a Magma Ocean at Io (sciencemag.org)

volcanopele writes: New analysis of magnetometer data acquired by NASA's Galileo Spacecraft between 1995 and 2001 has revealed evidence for an induced magnetic field at Io, the innermost of Jupiter's four Galilean satellites. During the mission, similar data revealed induced fields at the other Galilean satellites, resulting from electrical currents induced by Jupiter's magnetic field within liquid water oceans beneath their surfaces. With very little water on Io and given Io's intense volcanic activity, the scientists involved in the analysis suggest that the field is created within a silicate magma ocean 50 kilometers below the surface. The article itself is behind a pay-wall, but additional discussion of these results has been written at the Gish Bar Times.

Comment Happy Io Discovery Day, /. (Score 4, Informative) 161

Definitely a good time to check out Jupiter and the four Galilean moons before conjunction which happens in the next couple of months, so Jupiter would then be too close to the Sun.

A minor quibble with the summary above. On January 7, 1610, Galileo only recorded 3 "fixed stars" next to Jupiter. Two of the Galilean moons, Io and Europa, were too close together for Galileo to separate with his 20x power telescope. He continued to observe three moons at most, either because one or more moons were too close to Jupiter and were lost in the glare of the planet, Callisto was too far from Jupiter and was thus out of his telescope's field-of-view, or two of the moons were too close together, during subsequent nights, until January 13, when he was able to see all four for the first time.

Wikipedia is wrong on one point. True, his first observation of all four moon at once didn't come until January 13 and he didn't realize that there were four and not three until that time, but that doesn't mean that one moon's discovery (in Wikipedia's case, Ganymede) should be attributed to that date. By that point, he had observed all four on multiple occasions, just not all four at once. And to that point he hadn't even come to the conclusion that they were in orbit around Jupiter with their own separate orbits, moving a different speeds, until two days later, let alone ascribe identities to each of the stars he saw, connecting one star he saw with another from a different day, beyond the one to the east, the one to the west, and the one in the middle.

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