Sounds like you’re fed up with Elon and his BS, but I’d like you to take a moment and look around.
This article does not mention Elon. No one in this thread has mentioned Elon, except you. You have linked Elon to this solely because it deals with space, but you are the one propagating that link. You are the one keeping him in the conversation. Maybe, I don’t know, stop fucking talking about him?
Titan is a place where methane and ethane rain from the sky and have a hydrologic cycle like the kind we’ve only ever seen before with water on Earth. These organics form rivers and flow into seas, carrying sediment with them. This mission will be going to the equatorial desert to understand that sediment.
Titan, like Europa, is an icy ocean moon. Titan is even larger, though. While Europa’s ocean is measured to have about twice the liquid volume of all of the earth’s oceans combined, Titan’s ocean (which possibly has significant quantities of ammonia and organics and alcohols mixed in) has five times the liquid volume of all of the earth’s oceans combined.
Sitting atop this ocean is a thick icy crust, upon which is a surface that looks more earth-like than any other planetoid surface in our solar system. Although it looks earth-like, the chemistry is in fact fundamentally different. It is based around organic solvents instead of water as the dominant driver of weather and erosion. The water on titan is stored in the bedrock!
And the sediment on top? Well, titan’s atmosphere is 5% methane. That methane gets hit by UV light and turns into more complex organics. Titan’s atmosphere is also rich in nitrogen and carbon monoxide, which add Nitrogen and Oxygen to these complex organics. These organics sediment out and coat the surface. Around the equator, they blow into large dunes in a desert biome. Precipitation falls and erodes the tar-covered landscape. These complex organics get mixed together as sediment in the rivers and dumped into the beds of the polar lakes and seas.
Dragonfly isn’t going to the seas. Too dangerous for the first mission here. We don’t know what we’ll find, and it’s hard to communicate with earth, and there is complex weather and clouds called the “polar hood” that might interfere. Dragonfly is going to the desert, to observe the complex organics falling from the sky and gathering on the ground to be blown into dunes. These are the ingredients that will get mixed together in the seas. There is also a cool crater there that calculations suggest melted the H2O bedrock and created a water-filled pool for the organics that has long-since frozen over. However, calculations suggest that this liquid water pool full of organics may have stayed partially liquid for hundreds of thousands of years in the subsurface. This is a location where we can study: “what happens if you take a bunch of complex organics and add water?” How far along the path to life could they get before the snapshot was frozen?
Sure, I am not opposed to science. Just can’t help pointing out the lack of Healthcare for all whenever I see these budgets for other programs. Kinda absurd for granny to be rationing her insulin when we have this kind of money available
Negative 290f. Little past jacket weather. Will they have to stick a radioactive isotope in the thing to keep the batteries warm, I guess? Seems like a good and hard mission, right there. I want a picture of weatherproof methane aliens, damn it.
Odds are they’re using an RTG to power it anyways. Titan actually has a much thicker atmosphere than even earth and it’s much farther away from the sun as well so solar isn’t going to be a good option to power anything they send down.
RTG would need batteries to be getting charged to meet power demands of flight, but I guess that should take care of the batteries being kept warm enough.
Seriously. The United States just sent nearly $60B to Ukraine. Nearly 18 times more than this. If humans weren’t so intent on fighting with each other and instead spent that time, energy, and resources on advancing as a connected society, we could do amazing things. Instead, we’re barreling into the future as predicted by RoboCop.
You can’t just cut keeping tyrants at bay though. I totally agree starting a war is stupid, but defending against invasion definitely isn’t. And it prevents future wars from starting or spreading. So as cool as it would be to invest trillions into space exploration, we can’t just leave Ukraine out to dry.
I totally agree with you, I’m all for funding Ukraine’s defense. It’s just my idealist fantasy that everyone one day wakes up and realizes we’re being collectively quite stupid for the benefit of a very small segment of the population and we could do so much more if we cut them out.
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