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| Olde Tyme Religion |
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| 2017-09-24 |
| [DAWN] IT would take a person without a soul to be blind to the beauty of the images sent back from Saturn by the Cassini mission. The planet’s rings, first discovered by Galileo in 1610, have fascinated mankind ever since. Huygens, a Dutch astronomer, made more detailed observations in 1655, but it was Cassini who, in 1675, determined that Saturn’s main ring was actually made of three rings that were composed of small pieces of ice. After a journey of two billion miles that took seven years, the Nasa spacecraft Cassini spent 13 years circling the planet and many of its 62 moons. The European probe Huygens that it released over Titan has sent amazing photographs of an orange moon where rivers of methane have sculpted the inhospitable surface. But it was Enceladus that provided the biggest surprise with its plumes of water shooting into space. Together with the molecules of carbon-based substances detected by Cassini, the moon would appear to have the components for life, no matter how basic. |
| Posted by:Fred |