Comments on: Titan Rocks

By: 7

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 04:20:27 +0000

I say that we exploit it too.
But let us make our plans to do it with the best grammar possible, if you please.

In all seriousness though, I really love this stuff. I can’t believe how far we’ve come, and how far we get to continue in going. A moon in the Saturn system…I mean that is really cool.

By: Burgersoft777

Burgersoft777 — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 18:04:42 +0000

Not as late as I am….but I didn’t come to pronounce Huygens. I am here to enthuse about this treasure box of a world. Titan has great promise as a staging post and a manufacturing plant for almost anything you could dream up. Its a Bonanza world. A ripe plumb ready for exploitation.
If we go anywhere it likely that Titan will be place we go.

By: dre

dre — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 20:14:38 +0000

i’m a little late adding to the discussions, but i’m surprised at how much the very dutch huygens, when properly pronounced, sounds like the very english hawkins. any etymologists out there? connections?

By: LarrySDonald

LarrySDonald — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 19:27:16 +0000

I just reread this, kind of as a starting point to more info on Titan. Dunno how interesting this is, but here’s what happened..

I saw it about the time it was written, though knowing next to nothing about Titan I just thought “Yeah, ok, that’s pretty damn cool but it’s just some moon right? Perhaps I’ll read more about it later” and moved on. At about the same time, I started reading Pale Blue Dot by Sagan. It was form ‘94, so a bit dated fact wise but I really like his stuff so I’ve been working my way through his books. It had quite a lengthy musing on Titan, the so-far data, how it was gathered (probably the main point) and so forth. It seemed *really* facinating, but of course woefully little was known. It did say that there were plans to put a craft in orbit along with a lander though, doing more serious data gathering by local radar and IR as well as mesurements from the lander. I instantly thought “hey, cool, I wanna see that”. Then it mentioned that it was (hopefully) going to be launched about ‘97 and shoud take about seven years to get there. Hey, that’s like.. last year. Hey wait, I saw a picture from Titan on the BA Blog! That must have been the lander! Cha-ching, jackpot, I *don’t* have to wait ‘cos I’m reading outdated material and they’re there! Not that I’m a huge fan of instant gratificantion, but it’s nice when it happens to you.

By: NelC

NelC — Sat, 01 Oct 2005 15:14:50 +0000

There was a meme floating around the British media a decade or so back, criticising British sci-fi series for filming their alien locations in quarries and gravel pits.

The thing is, most of the planets and moons we’ve landed probes on are gravel pits. Our Moon: dark grey dust and gravel. Mars: orange sand and gravel. Venus: orange, half-melted gravel. Titan: orange, icey gravel. The makers of Dr Who and Blake’s Seven got it more right than they realised. The only thing they got wrong was the colour….

By: Nigel Depledge

Nigel Depledge — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 20:59:13 +0000

Another nice piece, BA. I’ve been following the progress of both the Cassini orbiter and the Huygens lander at the ESA’s website.
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/index.html

What a fantastic heap of data they’ve sent back. And the mission hasn’t even reached its half-way point yet.

I have a vague memory of either reading or hearing somewhere that people not brought up speaking Dutch physically cannot make some of the sounds in the Dutch language. I think the guttural in the back of the throat is one of them (or maybe the only one).

A lot of English visitors to Scotland have a similar problem, being unable to distinguish between the words “lock” and “loch” (or being unable to pronounce the two distinct sounds as two separate sounds).

By: Stuart

Stuart — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 03:33:26 +0000

M.A.DeLuca, I’m pretty sure that the pictures from the surface of Titan were taken with a black-white camera. The colouring was applied later to give a ‘realistic’ view of the surface. The colours actually come from the spectrometer measurements (one of the other instruments on-board) so are probably about right.