back to article No, seriously, NASA will fly a probe through Saturn's moon plumes

NASA is just days away from a flyby in which its Cassini space probe will fly through liquid plumes on Saturn's moon Enceladus. The agency's scientists said on Wednesday, October 28, its craft would fly down within 30 miles of the surface of the icy moon and attempt to pass through the plumes erupting from its south pole in …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hope Enceladus has evolved window squeegee guys

    If there's any kind of life at all then 19,000 mph means bugs stuck on the windscreen. In which case they'll need a "friendly" youth with a bucket of water and a rubber wiper pronto, or the sun-ward views will be nothing but lens flares.

  2. Graham Marsden
    Alien

    Anyone...

    ... spotted any Black Monoliths in the vicinity?

    1. mr.K

      Re: Anyone...

      Sorry, we only got wormholes out here. If you wanted black monoliths you should have taken the last exit. Here is what you do, get back onto the interplanetary transport network and head inwards about 4.3 AU, or about halfway towards the star the in the middle. When you exit, follow the music or a high pitch noise and you will find your way there.

      1. Chairo
        Happy

        Re: Anyone...

        ... get back onto the interplanetary transport network ...

        Unfortunately the new hyperspace bypass has not yet been built. The planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at the local planning department in Alpha Centauri for some time, though.

    2. bazza Silver badge

      Re: Anyone...

      In 2061: Odyssey 3, the captain of the spaceship Universe takes his vessel through the plume of a geyser on Halley's comet.

      Perhaps this should be called a Clarke manoeuvre. Afterall, another name for the geostationary orbit is a Clarke orbit.

    3. SeanEllis
      Facepalm

      Re: Anyone...

      "spotted any Black Monoliths in the vicinity?"

      Monolith is on Iapetus, as any fule kno. (At least, any fule who has read the novelisation of "2001".)

    4. DropBear
      Joke

      Re: Anyone...

      Shhhh, keep it down! Don't you know they're called "Luminosity-Challenged Monoliths" these days?!?

  3. moonrakin

    A bit of hot-dogging low flying ..... what could possibly go wrong?

    1. Robert Helpmann??
      Childcatcher

      What could possibly go wrong?

      The worst that could happen is something totally unexpected which would in turn provide us with loads more interesting information, so it really comes down to things going right but in a different direction.

      1. Marcelo Rodrigues

        Re: What could possibly go wrong?

        "... so it really comes down to things going right but in a different direction."

        As in "right but left"?

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Alien

    If the Monolith aliens are out there...

    "Tower, this is Cassini, requesting a flyby."

    "Negative Cassini, the pattern is full."

    WHOOOSHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

    (Although technically, NASA is not violating any "attempt no landings here" injunction from said aliens)

  5. Mark 85

    Those aren't water jets... They preparing to fire the engines and move to another system where they won't be bothered by the likes of us.

  6. Richard Boyce

    Contamination

    NASA generally goes to great lengths to avoid contaminating ET life with life from Earth. It would be unfortunate if this manoevre ended up contaminating life in the clouds of Saturn with life from Enceladus.

    1. Muscleguy
      Boffin

      Re: Contamination

      The environment around the Saturnian moons is one of hard radiation, made more concentrated by Saturn's electric field lines. Any life outside that radiation filtering ice cap will not have any sufficiently intact genetic material (however it is encoded).

      Note the environment is much, much nastier than, some, of those tardigrades, in dehydrated estivated form, survived outside the ISS, briefly.

      Said life will also be freeze dried in very short order by the hard vacuum. It seems to this biologist something that is unlikely to be evolvable to survive from an ocean entirely enclosed in an ice cap. Note it will be different from getting encased in the ice itself. In that situation life tends to create little droplets of water around them through the heat of respiration.

  7. skeptical i
    Devil

    food in space?

    Our moon is made of cheese and Saturn's got a moon of Enchiladas, what next?

    1. Rich 11

      Re: food in space?

      Pluto is not a hot dog.

      1. tony2heads
        Coat

        @Rich 11

        Out there he would be a very cold dog

    2. AbelSoul

      Re: food in space?

      Mars bars and Milky Ways?

  8. Kaltern

    I wonder what this will mean if they discover loads of life, bacterial or otherwise.

    Of course, mainstream media won't care unless these organisms have tits, but wouldn't this be the most defining moment in human history since we discovered social media?*

    * that really is a joke. Although it's a sad fact that it was a 'defining' moment...

    1. James Micallef Silver badge

      "wouldn't this be the most defining moment in human history since we discovered... "

      If "they discover loads of life, bacterial or otherwise", it would be "the most defining moment in human history."

      No "since....." required

      1. Turtle

        Or not.

        "If 'they discover loads of life, bacterial or otherwise', it would be 'the most defining moment in human history.'"

        Or maybe not.

    2. 0laf

      Now if they have 3 tits you might be onto something

    3. Roger Varley

      Can you imagine the lather the Daily Mail would work itself into at the prospect of illegal extra terrestial immigrants?

  9. 0laf
    Pint

    Seriously How the f*** do that do that?

    It's an hour and a half (ish) delay between Earth and Saturn. They're going to fly a couple of tons of delicate metal into an orbit just 30mi above the surface on one moon by using puffs of gas and a few gyros calculated in a system of many large objects.

    Many many pints due

    1. Rich 11

      Re. How the f***

      I think the other moons are far enough away that their influence is going to be negligible in comparison to Enceladus and Saturn. Anyway, Cassini isn't going into orbit: it's a flyby that might have a target volume ten miles in diameter and a hundred miles deep (still damn impressive to hit that at six miles a second, though).

      1. cray74

        Re: Re. How the f***

        With now very-good masses, locations, and motions for Saturn and its major moons, Cassini's navigators have a good map of the system. They also use the deep space communication network to very precisely, accurately locate Cassini and determine its motion. In fact, they know Cassini's location and velocity so well that during communications they perform radio science experiments like "watch the probe's acceleration in moons' gravity fields to determine the interior structure of the moon."

        Finally, Cassini's orbits through the Saturn system play out over days and weeks. Major details of flight plans are worked out years in advance (note this 2012 article discussing the current 30-mile flyby), while final course corrections to deal with a few kilometers in error may happen days or weeks in advance.

        On that note...Rich 11, you mentioned a target volume for Cassini. Do you have a reference showing the exact error in this flyby something like, "30 miles minimum altitude, plus or minus 0.5 miles"? I've been talking to a friend about errors in deep space navigation and this would make a topical current example.

  10. Faux Science Slayer

    Geothermal Energy Controls Earth's Climate

    Visit the Geonuclear tab at FauxScienceSlayer site for series of articles on the....

    REAL Physics, Chemistry, Geology, Climate and Biology of Earth....

    Hydrocarbons are a byproduct of fission energy and a precursor to life.

    1. Muscleguy
      Boffin

      Re: Geothermal Energy Controls Earth's Climate

      Not far south of me in Pitenweem on the southern Fife coast (The East Neuk to be precise) if you clamber over the bay at low tide you come to a place close to the low cliff where the fossilised stump of a cycad is exposed. Nearby are some rocks with the trackways of giant centipedes across them.

      But to destroy your contention we simply need to turn our eyes upwards (i.e. to later time periods) and see a line of hydrocarbon in the form of coal in the cliff face.

      Oh and oil companies employ electron microscopists to examine oil samples for micro fossil fragments (bits of leaf, pollen grains) of the sort you find not uncommonly in coal.

      I have as a souvenir of my PhD days a sweatshirt with a penguin in a scarf using an electron microscope and the legend 'South Campus EM Unit: the most Southerly EM unit in the World". That status was briefly threatened by plans to put an EM (on very sensitive dampeners) on an oil prospecting ship around Antarctica. But then the Big Ice got made a Science Park and it didn't happen. Which is how I know about that stuff as I wondered why an oil company might want to do that and looked it up.

      The precise organism bits they find tell them how old, from which epoch, the deposit dates. If it is too early or too late (Carboniferous is favoured, clock the name) then the deposit is unlikely to be large.

      Note too that evidence of early life in the form of carbon grains means it probably got going not very long after the crust cooled enough. When exactly did this fission occur then?

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