Space Forum / Space Science / March 2005

To view the Life on Mars discussion from another perspective:
Which experiments had been made on Earth with plants under
simulated Martian conditions in the lab?
It shouldn't be that difficult to recreate atmospheric conditions,

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-> I understand that there would be a substantial degradation of available
-> light at Saturns orbit comapred to Earths.  The question arises though
-> what would be the human perception of light at Saturn (lets say through
-> the Cassini photos, rings moons cloud layers)at ...

Just seen some pictures of Hubble, and The "Very Large Telescope"
(original name) in Chile. It made me think.
With a reasonable space based industry, moon mining, metal working,
aluminium and glass production, precision engineering, how big an

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Sunshine on Titan has to be 1/100 of that we have on Earth, because
Titan is 10 time farer than us from the Sun.
So, the Huyghen after landing get on a light to get pictures.
But how Huyghens could take landscape pictures?

I understand that there would be a substantial degradation of available
light at Saturns orbit comapred to Earths.  The question arises though
what would be the human perception of light at Saturn (lets say through
the Cassini photos, rings moons cloud layers)at visible wavelengths?

I played a bit more with that program I wrote, ironing out one minor
bug (it sometimes printed ratios in the wrong order, e.g. 2:1 instead
of 1:2. This didn't affect the validity of the near-integral numbers.),
and streamlining the code. I also changed the criterion of what is a

-> I've just finished reading "the big splat" by Dana Macenzie. In it she says,
-> that Theia's impact site is impossible to determine given that the Earth  
-> would have contained a magma ocean straight afterwards. Ok, fair enough, but
-> I think it was the Rev Usher who first ...

As stunning as the pictures are it has got me wondering as to the
orientation of the object we are viewing.  I'm pretty sure the
spacecraft was not flown thru the rings again, therefore it either was
imaging the objects from either side of the ring  with the distances

-> ;-)   ;-)   ;-)
-> --  
-> Eric Crew
Are you now intending to imply that, all along, you have been making a

-> I dont really know for sure whether Saturn is close to the Sun in its orbit  
-> at the moment, but it looks bright in the sky so I'm guessing it is. If that
-> is the case, could it be that the lake beds found by casinni are dry at the  
-> moment because its summer? In winter ...

Dumb question: If one were in circular LEO and crazy enough to want a
90-degree change of inclination, what's the cost in delta-v? Is it, as
intuition is telling me, equivalent to throwing away all your ~9 kps
and re-acquiring it all?

-> I don't think Cassini is designed to do areobraking.
-> It's a big spindly object with booms and whatnot
-> sticking out.  Fine for space but bad in atmospheres.
It could do it, very gently. There would have to be a lot of close

Maybe a follow-on mission would be a weather satellite
to orbit Titan.  It could also take weather pictures of Saturn
from Titan's orbit.
Use infrared cameras to do some higher res mapping from