'Alien' images of Titan stun scientists

[Deepak]

Link

Among the findings:

• The surface of Titan seems relatively smooth and uncratered, leading scientists to speculate that Titan may be geologically young.

• The moon's surface is largely devoid of any large-scale geologic features.

• There are dark areas and light areas on the surface, perhaps indicating liquid and solid areas, but measurements have shown those areas have very similar compositions.

• There are strange, streaky formations on the moon's surface as if material had been scattered by wind.

"We're seeing stuff, quite frankly, that's really hard to interpret," said Robert Brown, a UA planetary scientist who led the development of Cassini's Visual Imaging Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS), which measures chemical composition. "We're trying to hammer around and bring in information from other instruments to try and get a handle on what we're seeing. It's a little mysterious," Brown said. "The bottom line is that on other solid bodies you see things you recognize. Craters, other geologic features. This is a relatively smooth surface."

 

[RussSchultz]

It really pisses me off that a news article wastes columns to tell me about pictures, but doesn't give me any pictures to see. Apparently I'm supposed to be content to simply bask in the glory as described by Judd Slivka, glory be his name.

 

[Mariner]

Well, Huygens also has a number of cameras, with a bit of luck, we'll be able to see better pictures around the end of December!

Quite interesting really and it makes you wonder how accurately the scientists have guessed things to be on the surface.

 

[banksie]

Well, Huygens also has a number of cameras, with a bit of luck, we'll be able to see better pictures around the end of December!

Quite interesting really and it makes you wonder how accurately the scientists have guessed things to be on the surface.

Quite inaccurate I would expect. It has always been the pattern with previous probes that the guesses on what the conditions will be like are wildly wrong once we actually send a probe there to look.

Thats kinda what makes sending these probes such fun.

 

[Rambler]

som pics - http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/c...media_Collection(Search_Agent)_archive_1.html

 

[mito]

The universe is vast and infinite.

You'll see anything.

 

[Guden Oden]

Saying it's both vast and infinite is sort of redundant, don't you think?

Besides, how could it be infinite? That meshes badly with the idea there was a point in time where this place was created (ruling out the supernatural, of course...)

 

[fbg1]

Saying it's both vast and infinite is sort of redundant, don't you think?

Actually, saying it's both may be illogical. Depending on your definition, vastness implies an eventual boundary, or something by which to measure that vastness. Like saying something is both new and improved, one precludes the other.

 

[3dilettante]

Vastness in my book doesn't presuppose a boundary, though the concept of size loses most of its meaning when dealing with values of infinity.

Perhaps a better use of the words would have been "infinitely vast," giving a state of being vast, and the extent of its vastness being infinite.

 

[Basic]

The volume that contains matter is vast.
The full size of the universe (including the empty parts outside the above mentioned volume) is infinite.

 

[Fred]

The visible universe is finite, that is, the size of which is governed by the volume light has had time to cross and come into contact with, though that volume is *decreasing* under current cosmological models. That is, more galaxies are falling outside our light cone as time goes on.

Its an open question whether or not the *full* universe is infinite or not, in many ways its meaningless and an inprecise statement, almost outside the domain of science to deal with. Its a question of topology really, and its not unforseeable that we might live in a non paracompact universe.