NASA press release: Cassini Spacecraft Reveals 101 Geysers and more on Icy Saturn Moon
Saturn's moon Enceladus has been a surprising and fascinating target for the Cassini mission. Now, the spacecraft and its team of scientists have even more details on the sources of water plumes erupting into space from the small moon. Images available at the Cassini Mission imaging site.
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Cassini Spacecraft Maps Over 100 Geysers on Enceladus
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(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday July 30 2014, @08:17AM
Nothing like planetary tidal forces to get a moon to erupt into space? So what's up with our moon? Not even any magma, lately.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by SlimmPickens on Wednesday July 30 2014, @08:52AM
I love that spaceship.
- The videos [youtube.com] of all the gravity assists it took to get 5600 Kg out to Saturn in just seven years.
- How they tested Cassinis reciever for Huygens data and discovered it "failed to take into account that the Doppler shift would have changed not only the carrier frequency, but also the timing of the payload bits, coded by phase-shift keying at 8192 bits per second", and then adjusted the orbit of Cassini to adjust the phase shift. Orbital mechanics was used to fix a broken aerial using the medium of rocket fuel. It was reported at the time that it didn't work but Wikipedia says it did and that the data didn't get there because the channel was turned off anyway.
- Despite that, we still have the Huygens landing video [youtube.com]
- How Cassini was going like the clappers when it got there, and they just couldn't figure out how to do the orbital insertion without going through the rings. In the end they just gave up. They picked one spot that they thought was the least likely spot to destroy the spaceraft and literally gambled the whole thing by flying straight through a ring when they got there.
- The backlit picture of Saturn [nasa.gov] with Earth as a blue speck. It can never take this pic again because it's not as fast and the orbit is more round.
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Wednesday July 30 2014, @11:06AM
Wow, that Huygens landing video is really interesting.