Saturn's moon Hyperion discharges into Cassini spacecraft

a reply to: LABTECH767

Well, charge isn't really measured in voltage - it's coulombs - voltage is just the potential difference between the two points, but I am sure you know that as you seem to be clued up on electrikery. With a low voltage of 200v and the high resistance of a vacuum, the current must have been exceedingly tiny. Either that, or maybe the probe interacted with Hyperion's or Saturn's magnetic field which allowed the current to flow much easier.

a reply to: MysterX

Not a fan of reading source articles properly then? It states in there this is a recent study of old data.

A new analysis of data from NASA's Cassini mission has revealed that, during a 2005 flyby of Saturn's moon Hyperion, the spacecraft was briefly bathed in a beam of electrons coming from the moon's electrostatically charged surface.

Here is a link the actual paper submitted to Geophysical Research Letters by Tom Nordheim, of Mullard Space Science Laboratory, University College London

In there, it mentions previous studies from 2010 and 2012, so this particular paper must have been done more recently than that - also, it is written by a Doctoral candidate (I suspect this paper forms part of his Doctorate) so it could only have been started in the last 2 years anyway.

So, in summary, no one has sat on this news for 8 years. In fact, no one even realised it had happened until this post-grad looking for his Doctorate went sifting through old data and picked up on the really very tiny discharge recorded which was buried within reams of data collected by the probe over the years which will still be sifted through for years to come, with more discoveries to be announced.

It's a damning indictment of your own failure to read the rather simple OP article properly, much less do your own leg work and look up the paper yourself or in fact any other information before jumping in with both feet to first get your chronology all messed up, but to also call the scientists studying this massive pile of data (which you would have no hope at all of even understanding) incompetent amateurs.

There are incompetent amateurs involved in this topic, but it's not the author of the paper, but rather commentators on the fringe like yourself.

a reply to: stumason

I posted the link to the paper 3 days ago on the last post of the first page... Yours is the first response since so I guess he realised either he was in way over his head or his mistake...

I swear they think some sort of alarm went off and people scrambled to their desks panicking, screaming 'what the hell is going on, we just took a massive jolt!!' or something crazy.

As the EU people were getting all excited about Rosetta and the Siding Spring/Mars event I'm wondering why they're not crawling all these boards gloating that they were right with all of their assumptions - oh wait... Yes I do,because they weren't right that's why. Watch how their expectations morph closer to the realms of reality so they can just say they were right somehow. Watch how they forget about their massive discharges destroying our spacecraft or being visible from Earth. Suddenly normal levels of discharge that are part of standard theories become their 'evidence'.

They'll ignore the results of the plasma environment packages as well, because that involves nasty math and stuff like not proving their theories.

We've progressed to the stage where we measure enough variables in high enough resolution that we can make logical conclusions beyond just relying on 'interpreting what we see with our eyes' and they choose not to. But then they would have to accept failure so that's perfectly understandable.

a reply to: AgentSmith

Ah yes, so you did - in my haste to slap him down for his daftness I rushed to include the original paper and missed your post

You're quite right though - they're a noisy bunch when they get together to slap each other on the back when their pushing their theories (the same applies for a good many topics) but once shown to be wrong, or foolish, they all slink back to the shadows, only to re-emerge later when something else crops up.

a reply to: stumason

No problem! It helped to prove the point actually, I'm sure someone will slink in from somewhere with some sort of attempt at a retort though.. We'll see, sometimes they know when it's best to leave it :-)