Huygens!

[Super Christ]

This seemed like the best place to post this, so here it goes. Who else has been paying attention to the news from the Huygens probe? I, for one, think it's awesome. Titan is easily one of the most interesting moons in the solar system, being the only one with a significant atmosphere. And photos! Granted, they're not as great as the photos from the Mars rovers, but this is only the first mission there, not to mention the rovers were launched later.

Anyway, discuss!

(On a side note: I felt like my faith in humanity needed a quick kick in the balls so I checked out Yahoo's forum about the most recent news article about Huygens. I'd like to give the mods here a great thanks for keeping order, and not allowing this place to become anything like that wretched hive of scum and villiany.)

[Skogs]

Space Exploration is cool - but not 'billions of dollars that could have been spent alleviating third world hunger' cool.

[Doomgaze]

The only way this administration would use that money to alleviate third world hunger is to kill or imprison the people in the third world. Complaining about NASA when its entire yearly budget is spent in less than two months over in Iraq is asinine.

EDIT: Oh, wait. Huygens is an ESA project, isn't it? My point still stands, though.

[Carnage]

I think space exploration is awesome. Commercial airflights have already started so maybe when im older tehy'll be cheaper.

Space Exploration is cool - but not 'billions of dollars that could have been spent alleviating third world hunger' cool.

If people are hungry its their own fault. Children being the one exception.

[krissy]

If people are hungry its their own fault. Children being the one exception.

no.

the photos are very exciting. also recently the mars rover came across some pieces of it's landing module i think it was. pretty lucky, cuz they found a meteorite next to it and gained some new insigth into meteorite activity on mars (it being similar to earth's or something).

[SomethingBig]

What's the Huygen's mission?

If people are hungry its their own fault. Children being the one exception.

That's not true. Not every country can be rich in natural resources like the US.

[Sepho]

And before you say "they should get a job", I say "there aren't always jobs available."

When I read the thread title, I thought it said "Hyuuga", as in the noble clan of Konoha in the anime Naruto. Silly me.

I apologize, but I have nothing further to add to the conversation.

[Super Christ]

What's the Huygen's mission?

Part of the Cassini probe to study Saturn - Huygens specifically was sent to land on Titan so that we can learn more about it. Titan has a very thick atmosphere (approximately 1.5x thicker than Earths at the surface) Which has teased scientists since Voyager first flew by. Due to its thick atmosphere, we knew practically nothing about its surface until Huygens landed there. The best we could manage was some radar imaging, and even then I think we weren't able to do that until Cassini reached Saturn.

From the descriptions, it seems the moon is geologically active; Huygens landed in something like mud, and the aerial photographs look sort of like there are channels feeding into an ocean. The data is still being studied (and will be for a while; we're still studying voyager's data) but if what we see is in fact an ocean, it's almost certainly made of ethane.

[tomamar04]

Huygens is a European mission I think, which shows Europe is quickly catching NASA up in space technology.