Thursday, May 06, 2004

Smile for the camera. Make love to the camera...

The Cassini spacecraft has returned its first images of Saturn's cloud-shrouded moon, Titan. Even though they're still pretty fuzzy, the pics are as good if not better than anything we can get from Earth. And since Cassini is going to use Titan as a gravity-well slingshot to navigate the Saturnian system, returning to the giant moon time and time again, the wealth of information and fantastic images will only increase over time. Read the whole spiel at the official Ciclops site.

Personally, the Cassini mission has me far more excited than the Galileo mission to Jupiter. I dunno why. Europa and Io are easily the most interesting moons in the solar system, but I'm sure Saturn has held some trump cards close to the vest. Titan is so mysterious. It's as big as Mercury, and likely has lakes, if not oceans, of ethane and methane. It's a weird, strange world that is unique in that we know that we have little idea of how strange it actually is. This is going to be fun.

Now Playing: The Kinks Give the People What They Want

No comments:

Post a Comment