Surf's up near Saturn as boffins spot waves on Titan “At Huntington and Malibu,” the Beach Boys wrote in their classic Surfin' Safari, “They're shooting the pier,” while “At Rincon they're walking the nose.” And out Saturn way, it now transpires, it may be possible to suit up and hang five on a methane break, because boffins believe they've found waves on the moon Titan. The …
About the same as South Shields, I reckon.
A hollow glass surfboard should do the trick on liquid methane - I suspect the common epoxy-based composites might dissolve in methane, as would the varnish on a wooden board.
Maybe something more exotic, like an aluminium/aerogel sandwich?
Might be "bleeding obvious" to you, but till it is observed it ain't science - it was probably bleeding obvious in 1588 that the heavier a thing was the faster it fell, but then Galileo's balls dropped and the world was changed.
And kudos to those involved just for being able to see this, as noted above.
>the heavier a thing was the faster it fell
I'm afraid not. The force acting, gravity, is the same for any object, so a body in free fall will have the same acceleration regardless of weight. It is the aerodynamic property of the body which influences it's speed as it falls. So a feather and a heavier lead weight would hit the ground at the same time if they both possessed the same aerodynamic properties. And actually it is the aerodynamic property which limits the terminal velocity of the falling object. :-)
Silly question but what did they use that has a 2cm resolution? I didn't think any orbiter was that good ...
p.s. just read the article
"Four pixels in the images are brighter than one might expect from reflecting sunlight, Barnes reported at the conference. He concluded that they must represent something particularly rough on the surface — a wave or set of waves"
Four pixels? So it could be a lump of ice, a wave, an atmospheric disturbance or the Loch Titan Monster's back breaking the surface ...
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