Catholic Sensibility

In a space mood ... and why not? Tom Hanks' HBO Production From the Earth To The Moon has been on late night TNT the past two days ... er, mornings. Taped episodes and watched them while home sick with the flu earlier this week. Anita might have my shopping done, but I told her I wanted that on dvd if Santa could find it. Currently, the Cassini probe has completed a close fly-by of Titan and a more long range pass of Dione. See raw images here: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/raw/index.cfm to get a sense of what comes back fresh from the spacecraft. All those color photos you've seen from this and other probes? They are created from a composite of images taken in different light: red, green, and blue. The Titan shots image various wavelengths outside the visible spectrum to allow the penetration of the thick atmosphere on this moon. I like the Dione images beamed back, even if they seem to have processing glitches. It could be the moon, except that the white streaks give you a hint of some sort of ice deposit. Not straight like ejecta streaks coming from the moon's newer craters, but perhaps something flowing from underground. The ground on Dione isn't rock, by the way; it's mostly ice. I had to laugh over that horrid movie The Ice Pirates. Premiere episode of Star Trek: Voyager, too. Their premises? Simply that the bad guys had to steal water to supply life to populated planets. Unfortuantely for the writers of these sad efforts, there is no water shortage in planetary systems. Want water? Go to the moons of the giant planets. No giant planets or they're too close to the sun? Just head out to the Oort Cloud, where you'll find enough comets to water anyone's whistle. (Though in space, nobody can hear you whistle.) Saturn's major moon is Titan, about as large as the planet Mercury. Atmosphere is about as thick or thicker than the Earth's, though it is nearly as impenetrable as Venus'. Though they share a common basic composition of ice, each of Saturn's mid-range moons has an identifiable quality: Mimas is known for it's "Death Star" crater, Enceladus for an ultra smooth surface and possible ice geysers, Dione for its wispy streaks, Rhea for a cratered surface like our moon's, Tethys, for a magnificent system of chasms, Iapetus for being dark as tar on one half and bright as snow on the other, Hyperion for being oblong, and Phoebe for orbiting Saturn in the opposite direction of the other moons. Check out the large moons here: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/large-moons/index.cfm. If you're interested in the twentysome other bodies in orbit, lots of photos of those too on the "small moons" page.