Glorious Titan



Last night, Cassini made its first close rendezvous to Saturn's moon Titan, and what glorious pictures there are! I'm so happy those stupid environmentalists (of whom I'm proud to count myself when it's convenient) failed to get the Cassini mission scrubbed back in 1997 (because the probe uses nuclear-generated electricity - the horror! the horror!) Those profoundly stupid Chicken Littles tried to panic everybody, first by whipping fears of Challenger-like explosions when Cassini was first launched into orbit around the sun, and again months later with fears of a supposedly errant trajectory when Cassini flew past Earth again on its way out towards Saturn. Stupid fools! Ignorant chumps!

Anyway, I remember when Cassini's first pictures of Titan came back in July of this year, and how crestfallen all the planetary scientists seemed to be. They invested a great deal of their reputations in predicting the presence of large planetary hydrocarbon oceans on Titan, but the first pictures through the hazy atmosphere seemed to reveal little of such fluids, just the bright, happy, icy "continent" of Xanadu. Scientists like Carolyn Porco tried to put a game face on, but I'm sure they were thinking of the stacks of dissertations and the thousands of hours of earnest, difficult work reduced to instant rubbish. That happens sometimes when research meets reality.

Looking at these recent, better photos of Titan, though, something clearly is going on down there. Don't those look like coastlines to you? They do to me! Maybe those dark areas aren't oceans exactly, maybe a tarry sludge, but it sure looks interesting, *whatever that is*. From Cassini, it looks like the eastern Mediterranean from space, although a remarkably frigid Mediterranean it would be. No one is saying anything yet, of course, but they are probably quite happy with these pictures. Break out the hummus and grape leaves, it's a Levantine solar system!

On the JPL Web Site (via link above), they have a motion picture of what the moon looked like when Cassini approached, and it's easy to see the development of those strange semi-permanent methane clouds towards the bottom of the image. SO COOL!

One thing that worries me, though, is that Cassini's Huygens probe, scheduled to make a Christmas plunge towards Titan's surface, is currently projected to land in an area dominated by the dark *whatever that is*. I know they've designed it to float for a few minutes, but still! Maybe it would be better to nudge the probe towards a light area, and place a premium on a longer data-gathering period, and get better pictures, rather than risk losing the probe in *whatever that is*? What's so bad about Xanadu at Christmas? Olivia Newton-John's "Kira" would certainly agree!

Anyway, we have our own solar system spectacle tonight - a lunar eclipse! Go outside quick and marvel at the wonder and glory of it ALL!