3089

Atmospheric density on Titan is 1.45x that of Earth. Surface gravity is slightly less than the earth’s moon, so the atmosphere is far more extended than Earth’s.

3090

OMG moons aren’t supposed to have atmospheres! Who allowed this to happen?

:D

3091

That’s no moon!

3092

Wow, talk about a perfect mix for propellered flight! That’s like a dream scenario.

3093

Good article on Ars about it, including timelines - https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/06/nasa-will-fund-a-revolutionary-mission-to-fly-through-titans-atmosphere/

I will be 60ish when it lands. Yeesh.

3094

2034?

cries

3095

I’m kinda hoping that by the launch date new and larger rockets will be cheap and reliable enough that they’ll be able to move to a higher-energy launch and get there a little faster. In a simple world, someone would just need to adapt a boost stage into the Falcon Heavy payload fairing and all kinds of interplanetary exploration would become cheaper to launch and could get where they’re going a bit faster or pack more instruments on board.

Not sure that’s realistic the way these things are planned out and how careful they like to be with their hundreds of millions of dollars of cutting-edge equipment, though.

3096

Titan is a great subject of close study. Its atmosphere means that a human could walk around without a huge bulky suit.

3097

I remember reading somewhere that with the air density and low gravity a human could fly by strapping a pair of big lightweight wings to their arms and flapping.

3098

Xkcd, of course:

https://what-if.xkcd.com/30/

3099

Awesome. Except they should have had the plane on Neptune blowing from right to left… with the plane still facing forward :D

3100

I wish Randall would go back to updating what-if, it’s such a great set of columns. I still use some of them in my astro classes.

3101

Oh hell yeah. I still check semi-regularly.

3102
3103

The Terrans have deployed a light sail. This is the signal. Uncloak and attack.

3104

Just because I keep seeing various articles which forget that two nations did deploy solar sails before this…

This new one is notable because it’s a private group, cheaper than the big Japanese one, and they plan to do more with it than the NASA one.

3105

I did know about the Japanese one (though most things say the difference between light sail and IKAROS is the cube sat nature of it).

I didn’t know about Nasa’s NanoSail. It sounds like it never got the chance to demonstrate solar sailing because it failed to eject on time, though that wikipedia page is a bit ambiguous on what happened after ejection.

3106

It made a comeback and demonstrated deploying the sail and not much more (story here), kind of like the first LightSail from the Planetary Society. You’re right, the only ‘real’ solar sail so far was the Japanese IKAROS mission, though I hope the current LightSail 2 mission will be able to do many of the things IKAROS did, but cheaper and miniaturized for micro/nano-sats.

3107

Why did I never find out about this godlike site until now?

3108

PBS is airing a series this week about the whole moon program.

Not gonna have time to watch it each night, but look forward to seeing the whole thing when I can.