A habitat filled with normal air will float high in the dense Venus atmosphere, The atmospheric pressure there is the same as Earth sea level (1 bar). However, our air is a lifting gas on Venus with about half the lifting power of helium on Eath. The surface of Venus is far too hot, and the atmosphere too dense, for Earth life. This idea dates back to the Russians in the 1970s. Will we Build Colonies that Float Over Venus like Buckminster Fuller’s “Cloud Nine”?īy Robert Walker | January 12th 2014 09:02 AM Will the conscious brains of such intelligences be the ones to stare at such sights in the future, effortlessly transferring themselves around the solar system on beams of light? A robot could face the sun and “feel” its pale warmth on its skin. A laser might burst for just a few seconds to carry the information in a robot brain as sophisticated as a human brain, at a tiny fraction of the cost of sending a physical spaceship. It would have taken a about 1.5 hours for the beam to reach Saturn from Earth, although he would feel as if the trip was instantaneous. If Roy Batty was a robot, not a android, we could beam his mind to a body waiting for him at Saturn. All those… moments… will be lost in time, like tears… in… rain. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. I’ve… seen things you people wouldn’t believe… Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. What a difference a decent percentage of light speed makes! The same trip, at 1% the speed of light (3000km/sec) would take a little less than 5 days. This is also the first time Earth’s inhabitants were told in advance about a photo that would include their entire world. Although this is the second time Cassini has viewed it, the Earth has only been imaged from the outer Solar System three times, the first being the famous ‘pale blue dot’ image from Voyager. The spacecraft’s wide-angle and narrow-angle cameras were used to capture 323 images in a little over four hours, with the red, green and blue spectral filters combined to create the natural-color view.
Thus the need to find a time when the Sun is entirely behind Saturn as seen from Cassini. Getting a view like this is tricky because trying to see the Earth from Saturn means looking close enough to the Sun to endanger sensitive spacecraft detectors.
#Saturn sped painnt full#
Full background on these images can be found on this JPL page. The outer rings (from the G to the E ring) were likewise brightened relative to the already bright main rings. In both images, the Earth, Venus, Mars, Enceladus, Epimetheus and Pandora were brightened by a factor of eight and a half relative to Saturn to make them easier to see, although you’ll still need to zoom in by clicking to make them out. Note the blue color of the E ring, which is caused by the diffraction of sunlight. The second image (below) has been brightened and color-enhanced to tease out the ring structure.
“The E ring in particular shows patterns that likely reflect disturbances from such diverse sources as sunlight and Enceladus’ gravity.” “This mosaic provides a remarkable amount of high-quality data on Saturn’s diffuse rings, revealing all sorts of intriguing structures we are currently trying to understand,” said Matt Hedman, a Cassini participating scientist at the University of Idaho in Moscow. Enceladus is worth mentioning because the E ring, about 240,000 kilometers from Saturn, is made up of fine icy particles from the erupting geysers in Enceladus’ south polar terrain. A close look will reveal seven of Saturn’s moons, including the intriguing Enceladus to the left. In the mosaic (click the image to zoom in) we can see the Earth as a blue dot to the lower right of Saturn, but Venus is visible too to the upper left, and Mars shows up as the faint red dot above and to the left of Venus.
You may remember the ‘Wave at Saturn’ campaign from last summer, when the word went out that Cassini would be snapping a view of the Earth from Saturn space. Moreover, the view presented here is in natural color, so we see the color as it would be seen by human eyes rather than as distorted during observations at other wavelengths. That covers the planet, its inner ring system and all its rings out to the E ring. We’re looking at an annotated, panoramic mosaic made by processing 141 wide-angle images, sweeping across 651,591 kilometers. With the Cassini mission continuing through 2017, we’ll doubtless have many fine views of Saturn to come, but the images below merit special attention, enough so that I decided to close the week with them.
0 kommentar(er)
