Myopic Astronomer's Kaleidoscope

Extending a Hand, Hoping a Tentacle Might Shake It

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

When the director James Cameron proclaimed himself 'king of the world' on winning the Oscar for 'Titanic,' who knew that he also had designs on the rest of the solar system? His newest film, 'Aliens of the Deep,' is a grandiose hybrid of undersea documentary and outer-space fantasy that begins on our planet's ocean floor and ends many miles under the ice crust that covers Europa, the second moon of Jupiter.

The movie's sneaky transition from undersea documentary to speculative fantasy of a journey yet to be undertaken is so seamless that you could easily mistake the last part for the record of an actual space voyage.

Filmed in IMAX-3D, this 48-minute film is a visual adventure worthy of that much degraded adjective, awesome. And when the movie is observing the ocean floor where lava from the Earth's inner core is leaking into the water, the strangeness and beauty of an autonomous, teeming ecosystem that has probably existed for two billion years matches any science fiction you could conjure...........
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By GREGG EASTERBROOK

COLLAPSE
How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.
By Jared Diamond.
Illustrated. 575 pp. Viking. $29.95.

EIGHT years ago Jared Diamond realized what is, for authors, increasingly a fantasy -- he published a serious, challenging and complex book that became a huge commercial success. ''Guns, Germs, and Steel'' won a Pulitzer Prize, then sold a million copies, astonishing for a 480-page volume of archeological speculation on how the world reached its present ordering of nations. Now he has written a sequel, ''Collapse,'' which asks whether present nations can last. Taken together, ''Guns, Germs, and Steel'' and ''Collapse'' represent one of the most significant projects embarked upon by any intellectual of our generation. They are magnificent books: extraordinary in erudition and originality, compelling in their ability to relate the digitized pandemonium of the present to the hushed agrarian sunrises of the far past. I read both thinking what literature might be like if every author knew so much, wrote so clearly and formed arguments with such care. All of which makes the two books exasperating, because both come to conclusions that are probably wrong......
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Bob May
Thursday January 27, 2005

Guardian

During the 1990s, parts of the US oil industry funded - through the so-called Global Climate Coalition (GCC) - a lobby of professional sceptics who opposed action to tackle climate change by cutting greenhouse gas emissions. The GCC was 'deactivated' in 2001, once President Bush made it clear he intended to reject the Kyoto protocol. But the denial lobby is still active, and today it arrives in London.

The UK has become a target ...........
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In December, a UK-based group, the Scientific Alliance, teamed up with the George C Marshall Institute, a body headed by the chairman emeritus of the GCC, William O'Keefe, to publish a document with the innocuous title Climate Issues & Questions. It plays up the uncertainties surrounding climate change science, playing down the likely impact that it will have.

It contrasts starkly with the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world's most reliable source of information on the effects of greenhouse gas emissions. In its last major report in 2001, the IPCC adopted an evidence-based approach to climate change and considered uncertainties on impact. It concluded that 'overall, climate change is projected to increase threats to human health, particularly in lower income populations, predominantly within tropical/subtropical countries', and that 'the projected rate and magnitude of warming and sea-level rise can be lessened by reducing greenhouse gas emissions'. More than 2,000 of the world's leading climate experts were involved in compiling the report - the most authoritative scientific assessment to date.....
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Oil firms fund climate change 'denial

David Adam, science correspondent
Thursday January 27, 2005

Guardian

Lobby groups funded by the US oil industry are targeting Britain in a bid to play down the threat of climate change and derail action to cut greenhouse gas emissions, leading scientists have warned. Bob May, president of the Royal Society, says that 'a lobby of professional sceptics who opposed action to tackle climate change' is turning its attention to Britain because of its high profile in the debate.

Writing in the Life section of today's Guardian, Professor May says the government's decision to make global warming a focus of its G8 presidency has made it a target. So has the high profile of its chief scientific adviser, David King, who described climate change as a bigger threat than terrorism.

Prof May's warning coincides with a meeting of climate change sceptics today at the Royal Institution in London organised by a British group, the Scientific Alliance, which has links to US oil company ExxonMobil through a collaboration with a US institute....
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BBC NEWS | Europe

A French goat has tested positive for mad cow disease - the first animal in the world other than a cow to have bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). The European Commission says further testing will be done to see if the incidence is an isolated one.

The animal, which was slaughtered in 2002, was initially thought to have scrapie, a similar brain-wasting condition sometimes seen in goats. But British scientists have now confirmed the disease was in fact BSE.

More than 100 people in the UK have died from vCJD (variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease), the human form of BSE, after eating tainted beef.

But the EC stressed on Friday that precautionary measures put in place in recent years to protect the human food chain from contaminated meats meant there was no need for alarm over the latest finding.....
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Dangerous levels of climate change could be reached in just over 20 years if nothing is done to stop global warming, a WWF study has warned.

At current rates, the earth will be 2C above pre-industrial levels some time between 2026 and 2060, says the report by Dr Mark New of Oxford University. Temperatures in the Arctic could rise by three times this amount, it says.

It would lead to a loss of summer sea ice and tundra vegetation, with polar bears and other animals dying out. "Polar bears will be consigned to history, something that our grandchildren can only read about in books"--- Dr Catarina Cardoso

It would also mean a fundamental change in the ways Inuit and other Arctic residents live...
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BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Alarm at new climate warning:

By Richard Black
BBC environment correspondent

Global temperatures could rise by as much as eleven degrees Celsius, according to one of the largest climate prediction projects ever run. This figure is twice the level that previous studies have suggested.

The scientists behind the project, called climateprediction.net, say it shows there's no such thing as a safe level of carbon dioxide. The results of the study, which used PCs around the world to produce data, are published in the journal Nature.

Climateprediction.net is run from Oxford University, and is a distributed computing project; rather than using a supercomputer to run climate models, people can download software to their own PCs, which run the programs during downtime.
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The lowest rise which climateprediction.net finds possible is two degrees Celsius, ranging up to 11 degrees."
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FOR MORE CHECK http://www.climateprediction.net

The New York Times > Science > String Theory, at 20, Explains It All (or Not)
December 7, 2004

By DENNIS OVERBYE

ASPEN, Colo. - They all laughed 20 years ago.

It was then that a physicist named John Schwarz jumped up on the stage during a cabaret at the physics center here and began babbling about having discovered a theory that could explain everything. By prearrangement men in white suits swooped in and carried away Dr. Schwarz, then a little-known researcher at the California Institute of Technology.

Only a few of the laughing audience members knew that Dr. Schwarz was not entirely joking. He and his collaborator, Dr. Michael Green, now at Cambridge University, had just finished a calculation that would change the way physics was done. They had shown that it was possible for the first time to write down a single equation that could explain all the laws of physics, all the forces of nature - the proverbial 'theory of everything' that could be written on a T-shirt.

And so emerged into the limelight a strange new concept of nature, called string theory, so named because it depicts the basic constituents of the universe as tiny wriggling strings, not point particles.".......
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PhysicsWeb - Physics World - Five papers that shook the world:
Feature: January 2005

In 1905 an anonymous patent clerk in Bern rewrote the laws of physics in his spare time.

Matthew Chalmers

Most physicists would be happy to make one discovery that is important enough to be taught to future generations of physics students. Only a very small number manage this in their lifetime, and even fewer make two appearances in the textbooks. But Einstein was different. In little more than eight months in 1905 he completed five papers that would change the world for ever. Spanning three quite distinct topics - relativity, the photoelectric effect and Brownian motion - Einstein overturned our view of space and time, showed that it is insufficient to describe light purely as a wave, and laid the foundations for the discovery of atoms.

Genius at work

Perhaps even more remarkably, Einstein's 1905 papers were based neither on hard experimental evidence nor sophisticated mathematics. Instead, he presented elegant arguments and conclusions based on physical intuition. 'Einstein's work stands out not because it was difficult but because nobody at that time had been thinking the way he did,' says Gerard 't Hooft of the University of Utrecht, who shared the 1999 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work in quantum theory. 'Dirac, Fermi, Feynman and others also made multiple contributions to physics, but Einstein made the world realize, for the first time, that pure thought can change our understanding of nature.'

And just in case the enormity of Einstein's achievement is in any doubt, we have to remember that he did all of this in his 'spare time'."......
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The Week
19 Dec 2004


What mom can do

It started as a mother’s endeavour to give her son the ‘most appropriate’ education. Sonya Philip moved base from Delhi to the US when she could not find a suitable school in India for her dyslexic son, Vir. Now Sonya, 45, is back with the Learning Matters Foundation. "Much needs to be done to educate teachers and parents," says the 23-year-veteran educator. Sonia has big plans that include a school for dyslexics, a training institute for teachers and a diagnostic clinic.

This is about time that we did something to change this situation...


Indian Express- Columns - Alliance of diverse minds

Tuesday, January 25, 2005

Too many children struggle as the way in which they learn is not compatible with the way they are taught

Sonya Philip

It’s India’s “silent condition”. Condition, not illness — what can be called being learning disabled. Teachers know it exists among 15 to 20 per cent of their students, parents know it affects their children’s sense of self-worth because those who suffer from this condition are often marked for life with labels of being “stupid,” “lazy” or, worse still, “dumb”. But nobody much wants to discuss this in any sustained manner, perhaps out of shame or more likely out of ignorance about how to address the situation effectively. It scarcely figures in our national discourse on education.

Children who are learning disabled could be actually quite smart. Need evidence? Here are some people who were learning disabled and yet managed to do quite well in adulthood: Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill and, more contemporaneously, Richard Branson. Include in this list our very own luminaries, Mahatma Gandhi, J. Krishnamurthi, R.K. Laxman and Gulzar.

Students with learning disabilities often do not succeed academically because of the “one size fits all” approach to teaching that we’ve adopted in India. Moreover, there’s an absence of expertise and teacher training in the learning sciences; there are very few programmes aimed at assisting teachers to meet the specific learning needs of students.............
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The worst-case scenario will be devastating to the Earth. Do you know??



The New York Times > Science > Environment > Antarctica, Warming, Looks Ever More Vulnerable: "
January 25, 2005
By LARRY ROHTER

OVER THE ABBOTT ICE SHELF, Antarctica - From an airplane at 500 feet, all that is visible here is a vast white emptiness. Ahead, a chalky plain stretches as far as the eye can see, the monotony broken only by a few gentle rises and the wrinkles created when new sheets of ice form.

Under the surface of that ice, though, profound and potentially troubling changes are taking place, and at a quickened pace. With temperatures climbing in parts of Antarctica in recent years, melt water seems to be penetrating deeper and deeper into ice crevices, weakening immense and seemingly impregnable formations that have developed over thousands of years.

As a result, huge glaciers in this and other remote areas of Antarctica are thinning and ice shelves the size of American states are either disintegrating or retreating - all possible indications of global warming. Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey reported in December that in some parts of the Antarctic Peninsula hundreds of miles from here, large growths of grass are appearing in places that until recently were hidden under a frozen cloak.

'The evidence is piling up; everything fits,' Dr. Robert Thomas, a glaciologist from NASA who is the lead author of a recent paper on accelerating sea-level rise, said as the Chilean Navy plane flew over the sea ice here on an unusually clear day late in November. 'Around the Amundsen Sea, we have surveyed a half dozen glaciers. All are thinning, in some cases quite rapidly, and in each case, the ice shelf is also thinning.'

The relationship between glaciers (essentially frozen rivers) and ice shelves (thick plates of ice protruding from the land and floating on the ocean) is complicated and not fully understood. But scientists like to compare the spot where the 'tongue' of a glacier flows to sea in the form of an ice shelf to a cork in a bottle. When the ice shelf breaks up, this can allow the inland ice to accelerate its march to the sea.

'By themselves, the tongue of the glacier or the cork in the bottle do not represent that much,' said Dr. Claudio Teitelboim, the director of the Center for Scientific Studies, a private Chilean institution that is the partner of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in surveying the ice fields of Antarctica and Patagonia. 'But once the cork is dislodged, the contents of the bottle flow out, and that can generate tremendous instability.'"......
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next time your girlfriend complains about how difficult parking is, suggest her a shot of the male harmone, who is kidding ??


BBC NEWS | Health | Bad driving 'linked to hormones':

Map reading and parking may prove difficult for some women because they were exposed to too little testosterone in the womb, researchers suggest. The study, in the journal Intelligence, fuels the age-old male myth that women are deficient in these skills.

Scientists from the University of Giessen, Germany, found a lack of the hormone affects spatial ability. Low testosterone levels are also linked to shorter wedding ring fingers, they say. The research looked at the spatial, numerical and verbal skills of 40 student volunteers.

Spatial skill is the ability to assess and orientate shapes and spaces. Map reading and parking are spatial skills which men often say women lack. Women tend to disagree.".......
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The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: Sex Ed at Harvard:
By CHARLES MURRAY

Washington

FORTY-SIX years ago, in 'The Two Cultures,' C. P. Snow famously warned of the dangers when communication breaks down between the sciences and the humanities. The reaction to remarks by Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard, about the differences between men and women was yet another sign of a breakdown that takes Snow's worries to a new level: the wholesale denial that certain bodies of scientific knowledge exist.

Mr. Summers's comments, at a supposedly off-the-record gathering, were mild. He offered, as an interesting though unproved possibility, that innate sex differences might explain why so few women are on science and engineering faculties, and he told a story about how nature seemed to trump nurture in his own daughter.

To judge from the subsequent furor, one might conclude that Mr. Summers was advancing a radical idea backed only by personal anecdotes and a fringe of cranks. In truth, it's the other way around. If you were to query all the scholars who deal professionally with data about the cognitive repertoires of men and women, all but a fringe would accept that the sexes are different, and that genes are clearly implicated.

How our genetic makeup is implicated remains largely unknown, but our geneticists and neuroscientists are doing a great deal of work to unravel the story. When David C. Geary's landmark book 'Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences' was published in 1998, the bibliography of technical articles ran to 52 pages - and that was seven years ago. Hundreds if not thousands of articles have been published since."............
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BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Rover finds a meteorite on Mars:

The US space agency's (Nasa) robotic Mars rover Opportunity has discovered the first meteorite ever seen on the surface of the Red Planet.

Earlier this year, mission scientists spotted the pitted rock near to the remains of the rover's heat shield, which is lying on Meridiani Planum. Analysis showed it was made of iron and nickel, confirming it was not Martian, and instead fell from space.

Only 2% of meteorites on Earth are this metal-rich; most are rockier.

'This is a huge surprise, though maybe it shouldn't have been,' said Dr Steve Squyres of Cornell University in Ithaca, US, the principal investigator for the rover science payload.

The rock was identified as being metal rich in data from the rover's Mini-Thermal Emission Spectrometer (Mini-Tes) instrument. Over the weekend, Opportunity drove to the rock extended its instrument arm and used its Ma�ssbauer and alpha particle X-ray spectrometers to confirm it was not Martian.

The meteorite sits near debris from Opportunity's heat shield, which protected it during its entry into the Martian atmosphere nearly one year ago.".............
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Dare I suggest the following to fellow men who can't find a mate? ;-) mimicking females, meeting under the rocks, and the risk of advances from unsuspecting males, LOL!!


BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Cuttlefish wimps 'dress as girls':


Diminutive Giant Australian Cuttlefish males have taken to pretending to be female to elbow out larger love rivals, science magazine Nature has revealed. With males outnumbering females four to one, smaller cuttlefish stand little chance of getting close to a mate.

But they have been spotted changing colour to mimic females and hiding their masculine fourth arms. Scientists say they were then able to trick their way past male consorts to make their move, often successfully.

Researchers led by Dr Roger Hanlon from the Marine Resources Centre in Massachusetts watched smaller male cuttlefish adopt the females' mottled skin pattern.

'We found that female mimickers could successfully deceive the consort male and that they were able to position themselves near the female in 30 out of 62 attempts,' he said.

Of the five males that tried to mate, one was rejected, one was unmasked by the 'consort male', and three were successful. Two of the three successfully fathered offspring with the female.

But there were risks attached. Some of the larger males got a little confused - researchers saw 41 attempts to mate with the fake females.

In a competitive dating environment, female giant Australian cuttlefish could afford to be choosy, rejecting 70% of mating attempts, said the researchers.

But smaller males also tried their luck by moving in while male consorts were fighting, or by 'meeting females under rocks'.
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The New York Times > Science > Space & Cosmos > Money to Fix Space Telescope May Be Cut by White House:

"January 23, 2005

By WARREN E. LEARY

WASHINGTON, Jan. 22 - A much-anticipated service mission to extend the life of the Hubble Space Telescope could be jeopardized by a White House plan to eliminate funding for it from NASA's 2006 budget request, government officials said.

Officials in the Bush administration and in Congress, who asked not to be identified because the budget has not been officially sent to Congress, said NASA was one of the few agencies that would get a proposed budget increase next year. However, a mission to service Hubble, estimated to exceed $1 billion, will not be part of that package, they said.

The aging observatory, considered one of NASA's greatest achievements, could die in orbit by 2007 or 2008 if deteriorating batteries and gyroscopes that aim it are not replaced, experts have concluded. Since its launch in 1990, Hubble has been serviced four times by space shuttle astronauts who replaced worn parts and added new instruments.".....

Want to DO SOMETHING? go here for options : http://www.aas.org/policy/HubbleServicingCancellation.html

January 16, 2005

Titan's Big News: A Mysterious Shoreline

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

ARMSTADT, Germany, Jan. 15 - New pictures of Saturn's moon Titan and other observations show that the Huygens spacecraft landed on a spongy surface like wet sand or soft clay, possibly saturated with liquid methane. The sky was orange, with patches of ground fog. Even the fist-size lumps of ice were a dusty orange. Beyond the site, deep drainage channels appeared to lead to a shoreline in the distance.

But a "shore" to what? Scientists, in their first reports on Saturday on results of the successful Huygens landing, said the flat, dark area beyond the bright drainage terrain might still hold hydrocarbons, presumably methane, that can remain liquid even in Titan's climate of minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit. Or the basins may have been drained empty - a lake that was, and could be again.

"This is a view, an aspect of Titan we had never seen before," Dr. Martin Tomasko of the University of Arizona, leader of the imaging team, said at a news conference here at the European Space Operations Center.

The European-built Huygens descended through the dense atmosphere and touched down on the largest and most mysterious moon of Saturn on Friday. A recording of the sound of Huygens plunging through the ever denser air, as reconstructed from sensor data, was played at the briefing. A pilot on board would have heard the howling of a terrible windstorm and, just before landing, the beat of radar signals searching for the surface.

After a two-and-a-half-hour descent by parachutes, the craft kept sending back science data and images for 1 hour and 10 minutes on the surface - about what scientists had hoped for, but they would have been happy to settle for less. All the sensors for surface studies were reported to have performed normally for the duration of operations.

But a loss of one of the two communications channels for transmitting data to the Cassini mother ship reduced the number of pictures to 350, from a planned 700. Data on wind speeds on Titan were also lost, but radio astronomers said the observations may yield indirect evidence of the wind strength.

"That's the cosmos reminding us that we are just human," said Dr. David Southwood, the European Space Agency's director of science programs, who has ordered an investigation of the cause of the data loss. Most of the information was saved because duplicate sets were transmitted on the two channels.

After working through the night examining the pictures and data, said Dr. Jean-Pierre Lebreton, the Huygens mission manager for the space agency, "We have achieved all our objectives and probably more, and can now see a clear picture of Titan emerging."

Dr. Tomasko said further studies in the next weeks may explain the unknown nature of the dark regions that could be lakes or just flat surfaces of dark material. An examination of the reflectivity of light from the dark surface areas is expected to identify the signatures of the materials in the "lakes."

The distribution of the rocklike frozen objects surrounding the spacecraft indicated that "they were perhaps moved by liquid flow," Dr. Tomasko said.

He speculated that some of the dark features may prove to have been "wet not so long ago."

In an interview, Dr. Laurence A. Soderblom, a planetary scientist with the United States Geological Survey, said: "I'm struck by how flooded the surface looks. All the channels in the light areas flow from one dark area to another dark area."

If this evidence of possible liquids on Titan's landscape is confirmed it would support widely held pre-mission conjecture that the planet-sized moon has lakes and perhaps seas of liquid methane or ethane. It could thus prove to be the mission's most consequential discovery: that not only is Titan the only moon in the solar system with a substantial atmosphere, but it also appears to have flowing surface liquids, putting it in the company of only Earth and possibly Jupiter's moon Io, with its lava flows.

Another hypothesis has been that frozen water is also a significant component of Titan's surface, because the moon's mass would be greater if not for a considerable amount of water ice. The first pictures appeared to show that some of the ice lies in chunks on a surface that may be underlain with deeper layers of ice.

Previous studies of Titan's atmosphere showed the existence of complex hydrocarbon chemical processes, with methane the second-most-abundant constituent, after nitrogen. Huygens's atmospheric measurements revealed that methane molecules increase just above the moon's surface, possibly the result of evaporation. Dr. Sushil Atreya of the University of Michigan, a member of the research team, said that "presumably there is a reservoir of methane on the surface."

Dr. John Zarnecki of the Open University in England, leader of the surface science observations, said instruments sent back sharp spikes in their data that marked the moment and force of Huygens's impact. From this his team inferred the consistency of the surface at the landing site: wet sand or soft clay.

Among the first pictures to be made public, only one has been processed to show the orange hues of sky, surface and scattered ice spheres. At first glance, the litter of rocklike ice looked like the Martian landscape now being explored by the rovers, Spirit and Opportunity.

The half dozen other pictures just released are raw images, unenhanced by computer processing to highlight contrast. Some pictures were taken as much as 20 miles away and others just before or after the craft landed. Scientists said they had not had time to compare the Huygens images with the pictures taken by the Cassini orbiter on close passes of Titan. The Cassini pictures, limited by the smoggy pall hanging over Titan, also found evidence of the movement of rocks and other material on the surface. But some of the streaks visible near the equator appeared to be signs of windblown erosion.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Huygens sends first Titan images: "Huygens sends first Titan images
By Paul Rincon
BBC News science reporter in Darmstadt, Germany

The Huygens space craft has sent back the first images of Saturn's moon Titan, showing what appears to be a shoreline of an oily ocean.

One stunning black and white image reveals what seem to be drainage channels on a land surface leading out into a dark body of liquid.

Another shows a flat surface that is apparently strewn with boulders.

Scientists said Huygens captured more than 300 images as it dived through the moon's atmosphere.

Speaking about the picture of an apparent shoreline, John Zarnecki, principal investigator for the surface science package (SSP) on Huygens said: 'If it's not a sea, it could be a lake of tar. And did one see waves?'

The European Space Agency has released images captured from altitudes of 16.2km, 8km and one on the surface.

'The pictures just got better after we passed through the haze,' said Marty Tomasko, who leads the probe's imaging team.


BBC NEWS: VIDEO AND AUDIO
The first sounds from Titan

He added that the images would still need to be cleaned up and that scientists would have to study the pictures closely to interpret them.

'We may be seeing a coastline, but that does not necessarily mean it's liquid now,' mission scientist Andrew Ball, of the Open University told the BBC News website.

'It looks like something has flowed at some time to make those channels. But is it something that has solidified?'

One of two data channels used to record measurements is thought not to have been working on Cassini. As a result, some images taken by Huygens may be missing.

But the other channel had worked well, officials said.

The probe has been sending back data about the moon since it arrived on Titan - the furthest from Earth a spacecraft has ever landed.

Jean-Pierre Lebreton, mission manager for Huygens said the craft had been active for up to seven hours. He added this was probably down to good design keeping Huygens' instruments warmer than expected despite the temperatures of -179C outside.

'We might even have three floppy disks now,' said Professor Zarnecki, referring to the previous assumption that the SSP would only collect enough data to fill a floppy disk.

He said the researchers were happy, but that more work was needed before they could say how successful the instrument's measurements of the surface had been.


HUYGENS' INSTRUMENTS
1. HASI - measures physical and electrical properties of Titan's atmosphere
2. GCMS - identifies and measures chemical species abundant in moon's 'air'
3. ACP - draws in and analyses atmospheric aerosol particles
4. DISR - images descent and investigates light levels
5. DWE - studies direction and strength of Titan's winds
6. SSP - determines physical properties of moon's surface

Scientists are now piecing together the images, measurements and sounds that are being beamed back to Earth from the Cassini spacecraft, which had carried Huygens for the past seven years.

These should give detailed information on the moon's weather and chemistry.

The sounds of Titan's stormy atmosphere were recorded with an onboard microphone, and scientists hope they might even hear lightning strikes when they analyse the data.

Scientists were relieved when the probe relayed a signal at about 1020 GMT on Friday to say it had negotiated Titan's atmosphere.

This told them the first of three parachutes had deployed, pulling off the probe's rear cover and allowing its antenna to start transmitting.

The European-built probe entered Titan's atmosphere at an altitude of 1,270km (789 miles) at about 1000 GMT.

Dominated by nitrogen, methane and other organic (carbon-based) molecules, conditions on Titan are believed to resemble those on Earth 4.6 billion years ago.

As such, it may tell scientists more about the kind of chemical reactions that set the scene for the emergence of life on Earth.

The Cassini spacecraft arrived at Saturn in July 2004. It released Huygens towards Titan on 25 December.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/sci/tech/4175099.stm

Published: 2005/01/15 08:39:27 GMT"

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Methane rain feeds Titan's rivers: "Last Updated: Friday, 21 January, 2005, 10:08 GMT


Methane rain feeds Titan's rivers


Liquid methane rain feeds river channels, lakes, streams, and springs on the surface of Saturn's moon Titan, images from the Huygens probe show.

Scientists have also recovered much data from Huygens that had been thought lost due to a communications failure.

On 14 January, the spacecraft plunged through the moon's atmosphere, sending scientific data - including stunning images - back to ground controllers.

Teams outlined new results at a press conference in Paris, France on Friday.

'We have evidence of many Earth-like processes [on Titan] such as [rain], erosion and abrasion but with very exotic materials,' said Marty Tomasko, Descent Imager Spectral Radiometer (DISR).

Mission scientists added that these processes are active today.

Fluid flowing on the surface of Titan is helping carve channels between ridges of water ice, seen in the pictures returned from the moon.

They confirmed there is liquid methane (a carbon-based 'organic' compound) just below the surface of Titan.

The dark areas seen in the images is organic matter that settles out of the haze on to the surface of Titan. This is then washed into the drainage channels and basins that can be seen in the images.

The pattern of rainfall on Titan may be seasonal.

But Titan's methane must be constantly renewed from some source within the moon.

The European Space Agency (Esa) launched an inquiry into the loss of one of two data channels used to relay information from Huygens to Earth via the Cassini orbiter.

Scientists revealed that missing data could be recovered via a network of radio telescopes that listened for Huygens' signals as it plunged through Titan's atmosphere and settled on the surface on 14 January."

Hello and welcome.

This blog is meant to collect all the science articles i read, mainly related Astronomy and Physics. Some are also related to science close to our daily lives and affecting man and his environment.

Miopic Astronomer