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Cassini's final days at Saturn after 13 years of incredible discovery.

Thebobo

Thebobo

Lifer
On Friday September 15th NASA will plunge Cassini in the upper atmosphere of saturn to protect the moons from possible contamination. They will be also collecting DATA along the way and will be streaming the event live.

My favorite part of the Cassinis expedition was when they deployed Huygens to Titan and discovered the earth like geography of rivers and lakes of liquid methane. Not to mention on Titan all you would need is an Oxygen mask and protection from the cold. If I controlled NASA's purse strings I would plan more probes to Titan.

https://www.space.com/38010-cassini-spacecraft-saturn-grand-finale.html

Here’s the streaming schedule:

Wednesday, Sept. 13

  • 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT): News conference from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), home of Cassini’s mission control, providing a detailed preview of final mission activities.
Thursday, Sept. 14

  • 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. EDT (1700 to 2200 GMT): NASA Social event at JPL that includes a speaker program, which will be webcast live.
  • About 11 p.m. EDT (0300 GMT on Sept. 15): Final downlink of Cassini images is expected to begin; these images will be streamed online.
Friday, Sept. 15

  • 7:00 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. EDT (1100 to 1230 GMT): Live commentary about end-of-mission activities. An uninterrupted camera feed from JPL Mission Control, with mission audio only, will also be available during the commentary, NASA officials said.
  • About 8 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT): Cassini’s last science data, and final signal, should come down to Earth.
  • 9:30 a.m. EDT (1330 GMT): Post-mission news conference from JPL.

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Thebobo said:
On Friday September 15th NASA will plunge Cassini in the upper atmosphere of saturn to protect the moons from possible contamination. They will be also collecting DATA along the way and will be streaming the event live.

My favorite part of the Cassinis expedition was when they deployed Huygens to Titan and discovered the earth like geography of rivers and lakes of methane. Not to mention on Titan all you would need is an Oxygen mask and protection from the cold. If I controlled NASA's purse strings I would plan more probes to Titan.
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Now, I'm no spacey science person, but it seems to me that these two statements are in conflict.
 
zinfamous said:
Now, I'm no spacey science person, but it seems to me that these two statements are in conflict.
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I don't understand what you mean. Rivers and lakes of methane don't have any effect on you if you aren't going for a swim. An oxygen mask and a coat are sufficient as the pressure is the same. What are you suggesting is wrong with his statements?
 
MrDudeMan said:
I don't understand what you mean. Rivers and lakes of methane don't have any effect on you if you aren't going for a swim. An oxygen mask and a coat are sufficient as the pressure is the same. What are you suggesting is wrong with his statements?
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well, I took it to mean "all you need for survival/living on this planet"

I generally think I'd prefer my lakes and rivers to be of water rather than methane, to support human colonization. 😀
 
MrDudeMan said:
I don't understand what you mean. Rivers and lakes of methane don't have any effect on you if you aren't going for a swim. An oxygen mask and a coat are sufficient as the pressure is the same. What are you suggesting is wrong with his statements?
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Better be a damn good coat to keep you warm in -290º weather!
 
Surely it would be even colder on Titan without the insulating effect of methane in the atmosphere.

Also, oxygen leaks could prove rather hazardous in such an environment, under the right (wrong) conditions.
 
Cassini made its last visit to the moon Titan using its gravity to alters Cassini's course one last time. Cassini is now on its final leg to intercept Saturn. There won't be any pictures at the end as Cassini will be using all its resources for the science instruments and sending the data back.

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Thebobo said:
Cassini made its last visit to the moon Titan using its gravity to alters Cassini's course one last time. Cassini is now on its final leg to intercept Saturn. There won't be any pictures at the end as Cassini will be using all its resources for the science instruments and sending the data back.
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Well poop. :cryingcat:

I'll still try and remember to check out the happenings on Friday but that's kind of a bummer. So any last pictures would be from around 07:14 SCET on 15-Sept?
 
Thebobo said:
Not to mention on Titan all you would need is an Oxygen mask and protection from the cold. If I controlled NASA's purse strings I would plan more probes to Titan.
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What sort of suit would we need to survive on Titan?

Now, on Titan, you’d need heating, not cooling. That’s going to be a taller order. First, it’s crazy cold. How cold? Try around -179 Celsius. Yikes. Add to that the fact that the pressure is 1.45 times that on Earth, so you’ll lose heat through conduction and convection that much more quickly. Also, it “rains” on Titan, but the rain is liquid methane or ethane, and that stuff will suck the heat out of you even faster.

How fast? That’s the real question here. Your suit will have to provide all of the heat that the atmosphere pulls from you (well, nearly all - you provide a little). You can’t burn anything to provide this heat - there’s no oxygen to combust your fuel. Unless you bring your own for heat generation, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Nuclear power could work, so long as you don’t mind a little radiation poisoning, and or cancer. Yeah, me neither.

I spent quite a while trying to figure out the rate of heat loss through various suits under conditions such as these, and I admit, it’s beyond me. Turns out no one goes swimming in liquid nitrogen or dunking lab animals into cryonic gases.

That said, I can tell you that the suit would need to be:

  1. Airtight (obviously)
  2. Very thick - to allow for maximum insulation
  3. Heated - to replace the heat you lose.
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Any news yet on why that storm is hexagonally shaped?

Why not send 2 spacecraft to Saturn and have one plummet while sending pics of it's descent to the other one that can act as a relay to transmit those to Earth?
 
Cassini is no longer. 🙁 A happy and sad occasion. The event was live covering the Cassini mission control room and some sporting video clips. The anticipation for folks waiting to receive the last bits of data signaling the end of decades of one's career with cassino was tough to watch. There was a mixture of emotion at mission control, happiness in the mission completed but sadness hugs and folks tearing up.

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PS they might be showing replays at NASA TV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P11y8N22Rq0
 
disappoint said:
Any news yet on why that storm is hexagonally shaped?

Why not send 2 spacecraft to Saturn and have one plummet while sending pics of it's descent to the other one that can act as a relay to transmit those to Earth?
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They talked about it in the PBS show and they call it the Hexagon. Best to go to the wiki site to get a full explanation. Explanations for hexagon shape. If you have the time I would recommend watching the PBS documentary it explores a lot of the discoveries that have been made that many probably don't know about.

One thing I remember is them mentioning the color changes during its orbit as one pole gets more sun.
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2013 and 2017: hexagon color changes
 
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It's not much to see but it's the last image taken by Cassini of Jupiter. Remember that the Casino design was started some 30 years ago so the imaging technology was very different. Now you could layer it with gopro 4k clones.

"CASSINI'S FINAL IMAGE (NATURAL COLOR)
This natural color view, created using images taken with red, green and blue spectral filters of Cassini's Solid-State Imaging system, is the last image taken by the spacecraft. It looks toward the planet's night side, lit by reflected light from the rings, and shows the location at which the spacecraft would enter the planet's atmosphere hours later."

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Cassini: The dying of the light
 
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