mikel137      

12-23-2009  17:31:32

Will you identify perhaps two of the stars for us?

mikel137      

12-23-2009  17:11:18

At six years, Cassini has accompanied Saturn over a radian of that planet's orbit around the Sun-at least the same distance along the periphery as the radius of the orbit. Sort of like dividing h by 2*pi. Which is why it seems the ring spokes could have something to do with momentum conservation along the ring orbits.

mikel137      

12-11-2009  19:43:20

The vast diameter of Saturn's orbit and the excellent cameras on your Orbiter make this amateur astronomer lust for parallax measurements. It would take fifteen years to obtain the measurements. Images now of rich, relatively nearby fields such as the Plieades would be a quick start. Images of the same fields fifteen years from now would complete the first sets of parallax images. Fields should include recognizable distant background objects too.

mikel137      

01-29-2009  12:56:15

Intense interest in hydrocarbons on Titan seems to go beyond the mere possibility of Titan harboring life or some precursors of life. It appears fueled by political or economic interest or perhaps something more fundamental like a primal concern for the scarcity of carbon in the world today. Most carbon was removed from the terrestrial environment circulating in ancient times during the Carboniferous when fossil fuels were laid down. As a result, the digging of coal and pumping of oil out of the ground should be viewed as a good thing, a part of what is called Reclamation here in the United States.

Apart from that, only space aliens, or a nation's ambitious interest in dominating the world thirty years at a time, could command such enthusiasm.