sugarplumkitty | Lecture about Titan

Last night I went to the last seminar required for my internship for this quarter. It was the second in the astronomy lecture series hosted by Foothill College, NASA, SETI and the Astonomy Society. The lecturer was a fill-in due to a conflict of the original speaker. This guy works at NASA/Ames and was involved in designing a probe that landed on Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Unfortunately, it isn't as interesting of a moon as Europa. It might have been if they got more pictures but the atmosphere is so thick that pictures of the surface are impossible from space. It has an atmosphere but that's mainly methane and CH4 whatever that is. (I don't know my chemistry). It makes for a very smoggy moon. Supposedly the moon is 50% water but it's -80°rees; celcius so the water is as hard as rocks. In fact the one picture they got from the probe after it landed shows a flat landscape littered with rounded rocks that they're assuming are ice. Due to bent antennae from the landing, they didn't get as much spectrograph data as they'd hoped. Between that and forgetting to send a "Turn on" message to a second transmitter on the probe as it landed, they lost a bunch of images and data.

One interesting fact is that the probe didn't land with a splash or a thud, it landed with a splat. He told us those were scientific terms, lol. It means Titan is a big mud ball, at least where they landed. He thinks it landed in a dry riverbed judging from the positions and roundedness of the rocks. If it's a riverbed, sometimes liquid methane flows. Can you say stinky?

The orbiter that launched the probe still swings by on its orbit taking pictures of the atmosphere. They had clouds on the south pole when they landed the orbiter in 2004. Now the clouds are gone. They expect to see clouds on the north pole in 16 years. They think the clouds at the poles are a summer phenomenon.

He was a funny guy with good jokes but the lack of pictures were probably the problem. That and the light over my section of seats had a bad case of the blinkies. I was getting a headache from the constant flicker, especially since I was taking notes and looking at my white paper a lot of the time. That was irritating along with the kid in front of me who looked short when I sat down but suddenly grew taller just before the lecture started and kept moving his head around blocking the screen so I had to keep moving mine around to get the spelling of the technical terms I needed for the mini-paper I need to write.

The kid didn't want to be there. It was obvious his dad dragged him. His dad was demanding he do the calculatons to discover the closest and farthest distances of Saturn to Earth. This is not a good relationship.

Ooh, and one benefit was a poster of Saturn! Cool beans!