Huygens shortlived?

Eric Chomko wrote:
Joseph Lazio ) wrote:
: "RK" == Rodney Kelp writes:
: RK When they going to take a look at the surface of Saturn?
: They aren't, and they can't. In all likelihood, Saturn does not have
: a "surface." Rather, the atmosphere just keeps getting denser and
: denser as you go deeper.

Wouldn't it make sense that Saturn, as well as the other gas planets, has
a thick atmosphere, followed by a liquid layer and then a solid layer
(lithoshere). Unlike earth, they would be gradual from gas to liquid and
liquid to solid. Just a theory of course.

That depends on the planet and its mass.

One thing to realize is that the pressures are very high
(Jupiter's core is at about 80 megabars) and temperatures
are also very high (20-30,000 K in the core of Jupiter).
Solid metallic hydrogen requires low temperatures.

Uranus and Neptune probably don't have liquid or solid
hydrogen at their cores; they do apparently have a liquid
core of water, then some solid ices around an inner rock core,
but they don't have enough total mass to compress the
hydrogen enough for it to be liquid or solid.

Saturn apparently has a liquid metallic hydrogen outer core,
under layers of gas and liquid hydrogen. There's a solid
rock/ice core at the middle. The metallic hydrogen isn't
compressed enough to be solid.

Jupiter apparently also has an outer core which is
liquid metallic hydrogen, not solid, and an inner core of
rock and other solids.


-george william herbert

On Fri, 21 Jan 2005, in sci.space.tech,
Hop David said:

John Schilling wrote:
When they going to take a look at the surface of Saturn?
If that wasn't a troll or a joke that went right over my head, the
answer is that Saturn doesn't have a surface.

I am guessing by "surface" Rodney means cloud tops 60,270 km from
Saturn's center.

There've been lots of pics of Saturn's rings and moons but, come to
think of it, haven't seen many close-ups of Saturn.

Saturn has a haze above the cloud tops that makes pictures of it less
interesting from both an aesthetic and a scientific point of view. It's
why you get those spectacular marbled images from Jupiter and just a few
shots of pale streaky Saturn.

It's a good thing for its self-esteem that it has those gorgeous rings,
really :-) Just think what a dull yellow orb it would be otherwise.

Uranus and Neptune make a similar pair: quiet Uranus and swirly
blue-onyx Neptune, with Uranus redeemed by its unusual polar orientation
(when seen at the right time of "year"). ISTR the appearance is again
mostly an effect of high-level haze, although Uranus actually is
genuinely less active than Neptune.

--
Del Cotter
Thanks to the recent increase in UBE, I will soon be ignoring email
sent to . Please send your email to del2 instead.

All good points made here. I can see now why the proble had to be the
way it was.

An interesting side note. Its been reported that the Parkes
observatory continued to detect data from Huygens 3 hours after Cassini
passed out of range. Whether the data was useful - i dont know.

"dexx" wrote in message
...
An interesting side note. Its been reported that the Parkes
observatory continued to detect data from Huygens 3 hours after Cassini
passed out of range. Whether the data was useful - i dont know.

Radiotelescopes could detect the Huygens signal (and provided immediate
confirmation that the probe had successfully deployed in Titan's
atmosphere), but they couldn't collect data.

dexx wrote:
[...]
An interesting side note. Its been reported that the Parkes
observatory continued to detect data from Huygens 3 hours after Cassini
passed out of range. Whether the data was useful - i dont know.

Just as a matter of interest, were any of the Earth-based radio telescopes
able to extract actual data from Huygens' datastream, or were they just
picking up the carrier wave? Could we get all those lost pictures from
analysing the telemetry?

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Carey Sublette wrote:
Radiotelescopes could detect the Huygens signal (and provided immediate
confirmation that the probe had successfully deployed in Titan's
atmosphere), but they couldn't collect data.

Couldn't collect telemetry at least. They ought to be able
to provide some useful dopler data and thus information on
Titan's winds.