Comments on: Enceladus flyby

By: Buzz Parsec

Buzz Parsec — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 06:55:17 +0000

Jimi and Madge, Have you seen “A Grand Day Out” (first Wallace and Gromit film)? BTW, Bob Park and Steven Weinberg hated it.

By: Gary Ansorge

Gary Ansorge — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 13:49:23 +0000

Shane:
So? They’d have to learn to count in decimal instead of octal.

GAry 7

By: shane

shane — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 02:10:29 +0000

@GAry 7: “So much water, so much reaction mass for a nuclear rocket”

So you’d ruin the pristine space environment with nukes and radiation? How are the poor alien mothers going feel when their alien babies are born with 10 tentacles instead of eight?

By: IVAN3MAN

IVAN3MAN — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 21:37:32 +0000

@ John Weiss

According to Wikipedia — Enceladus (moon), the Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer (INMS) and the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS) both confirmed that the plumes emanating from Enceladus’s south pole region is, indeed, water vapor, but no ammonia was detected in the vented material by INMS or UVIS; however, simple and complex hydrocarbons such as propane, ethane, and acetylene were detected.

By: John Weiss

John Weiss — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 19:07:54 +0000

Why is it water ice and not some other ices? Actually, you do get other hydrogen compounds freezing in the outer solar system. However, oxygen is the most abundant element in the solar system after hydrogen and helium. Given that, water is expected to be the second most abundant molecule (after hydrogen), so its ices should be more common than methane and ammonia. (There are other, more subtle reasons that water would be more common in a given location involving physical properties like freezing points, but that’s the biggest one.)

And yes, spectra show that these guys are mostly water ice. I don’t think that there are any confirmed detections of ammonia on Enceladus yet, for example.

By: shane

shane — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 14:40:02 +0000

@SLC,
Good on ya SLC mate, is that the best you can do? As I mentioned you sound like a broken record. Really. We got it the first time. Now you bring nothing more to conversation than snide remarks and ad homs. We, the great unwashed masses of the intertoobs, do have opinions. Sometimes they have to do with US policy. Deal with it. You might be surprised to find that some Australians and Canadians and Nigerians and Kazaks and Burmese, et al also have an opinion on who your next president should be. We don’t vote in your elections either.

So you don’t like your taxes going to stuff you don’t like? Waaah. Stuff happens. You do realise though that Australia and NASA have had for decades a long standing partnership in operations and facilities in Australia? Facilities, operations and the support of manned space flights and the purely robotic space missions? What? Can it be that Australian tax payers have a stake too?

Look, I’ll put it in a way you might understand. Some people don’t want to pay for any space exploration at all while there is poverty on earth. What would you say to them? I would suggest your arguments would be very similar to ours, those who believe in manned space exploration.

He who pays the piper, Mr. SLC from the USA, may call the tune but it doesn’t mean we can’t hum along or dance to that tune.

By the way I have no comment on US taxpayers.
Well, except for this, are the 40% of Americans who do not pay tax entitled to an opinion? Or are you of the opinion that should be no representation without taxation?

By: Gary Ansorge

Gary Ansorge — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 23:02:49 +0000

So much water, so much reaction mass for a nuclear rocket,,,

GAry 7