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As Seen In Atomic Robo

Space Has a Smell
The Science Officer on the International Space Station has announced that space has a smell, oddly enough.

The best description I can come up with is metallic; a rather pleasant sweet metallic sensation. It reminded me of my college summers where I labored for many hours with an arc welding torch repairing heavy equipment for a small logging outfit. It reminded me of pleasant sweet smelling welding fumes. That is the smell of space.

A commenter on Slashdot pointed out that this smell he thinks is akin to welding may in fact be Ozone, which is often generated by high voltage, such as that used in many forms of welding (it does sound like he's talking about arc welding there).

I seem to recall a smell not unlike what he describes from my days using a MiG welder, but it's been a long time.

Source: International Space Station Blog (NASA)

Oil Beyond Imagination
The ESA (European Space Agency) has announced a preliminary study of the depth of Titan's reserves of hydrocarbons, or as they're known on Earth, 'fossil fuels' (though they're not from dead creatures on Titan... we hope).

Saturn’s orange moon Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to new Cassini data. The hydrocarbons rain from the sky, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes.

...

At a balmy minus 179º C , Titan is a far cry from Earth. Instead of water, liquid hydrocarbons in the form of methane and ethane are present on the moon's surface, and tholins probably make up its dunes. The term ‘tholins’ was coined by Carl Sagan in 1979 to describe the complex organic molecules at the heart of prebiotic chemistry.

Cassini has mapped about 20% of Titan's surface with radar. Several hundred lakes and seas have been observed, with each of several dozen estimated to contain more hydrocarbon liquid than Earth's oil and gas reserves. The dark dunes that run along the equator contain a volume of organics several hundred times larger than Earth's coal reserves.

That's right. Titan has seas of methane and ethane, and its land is made up of, in essence, a complex peaty coal dust. Only without the peat.

The whole planet is one giant ball of fuel, supercooled and stored far beyond our reach.

It boggles the mind to think about a small planet made, in essence, of OIL. But that's what Titan turns out to be.

There's even a theory that the planet is essentially hollow, and filled with more methane.

Yeesh.

Source: ESA Space Science

Iapetus
Saturn has another bizarre moon that Cassini has been studying in more detail of late -- the black and white cookie of outer space, Iapetus. Iapetus has puzzled scientists for some time because of its odd appearance.. the moon is half white, snow white, and half jet black, with almost no other variation, divided right down the middle. But there's a theory emerging now.

This 'thermal segregation' model may explain many details of the moon's strange and dramatically two-toned appearance, which have been revealed in exquisite detail in images collected during Cassini’s recent close fly-by of Iapetus.

Infrared observations from the fly-by confirm that the dark material is warm enough (approximately -146°C or 127 Kelvin) for very slow release of water vapour from water ice, and this process is probably a major factor in determining the distinct brightness boundaries.

"The side of Iapetus that faces forward in its orbit around Saturn is being darkened by some mysterious process," said John Spencer, Cassini scientist with the composite infrared spectrometer team from the Southwest Research Institute, USA.

So the side of Iapetus that faces ahead in its orbit is getting blackened by something, and warms up. In turn, this vaporizes water, which moves to a colder part of the planet... the other hemisphere, where it condenses into white, reflective ice, making that side colder...

"It's interesting to ponder that a more than 30 year-old idea might still help explain the brightness difference on Iapetus," said Tilmann Denk, Cassini imaging scientist at the Free University in Berlin, Germany. "Dusty material spiraling in from outer moons hits Iapetus head-on, and causes the forward-facing side of Iapetus to look slightly different than the rest of the moon," said Denk.

Once the leading side is even slightly dark, thermal segregation proceeds rapidly. A dark surface will absorb more sunlight and warm up, explains Spencer, so the water ice on the surface evaporates. The water vapour then condenses on the nearest cold spot, which could be Iapetus’s poles, and possibly bright icy areas at lower latitudes on the side of the moon facing in the opposite direction of its orbit. So the dark stuff loses its surface ice and gets darker, and the bright stuff accumulates ice and gets brighter, in a runaway process.

So there you have it. One moon has both runaway cooling AND runaway heating at the same time.

Weird.

Source: ESA Space Science

Vocoders and Voders
I was looking into the Spiderman theme song and read that the 94 TV series version was done by the lead guitarist of Aerosmith, and he used a Vocoder to do the sci-fi sounding voice. A vocoder, it turns out, is a computerized instrument to capture and synthesize a human voice. Interestingly, there's a counterpart, the Voder, which creates a purely synthetic voice from playback like a very complex musical organ of sorts that only plays voices.

That would be spiffy to see in a concert. I bet it's a real pain to learn though.

Source: Wikipedia (Vocoder)