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elwenYay for LiveJournal being, well, alive again.
So the chem set wasn't bad; in fact, it was happier than the other two sets, just made less sense at the start, I suppose.
Anyway, so yesterday, the probe landed on Titan. That's about all I know about it, but apparently the pictures came out just before Ch21 lecture. You may have noticed that the class page was on the GPS (geology and planetary science) server. That's because our prof is from GPS, so he was quite excited about Titan, and even ended lecture earlier so he could show us the pictures.
So he sets up his computer to show pictures, except the projector won't turn on, so we end up looking at them on his tiny laptop screen sitting at the front of the room. He shows us a picture of Titan's surface that is dark grey and very low contrast and really rather boring. But he's practically jumping up and down and crying, "Look! There are rocks! And you can see the horizon!"
Meanwhile, he has an audience of chemists staring blankly back at him. One even asked, "Wait, so Titan is a planet -- oh, it's a moon -- that's covered in . . . ice?"
I was pretty amused, anyway. He explained afterwards, of course, how they thought they might not be able to see Titan's horizon because of haze in the atmosphere, and how they have no process to account for the formation of rocks on Titan since there are no impact craters (the cause of rocks on Mars) nor tectonics (the cause of rocks on Earth).
He did tie things into spectroscopy a bit. For one thing, he said they measured the temperature of Titan's surface through Doppler broadening (I think) and the winds through pressure broadening of peaks. I thought that was cool, and probably a big reason GPS people know spectroscopy. And at the end he said something really rapidly about photodissociation, but unfortunately only Raman understood it.
So the chem set wasn't bad; in fact, it was happier than the other two sets, just made less sense at the start, I suppose.
Anyway, so yesterday, the probe landed on Titan. That's about all I know about it, but apparently the pictures came out just before Ch21 lecture. You may have noticed that the class page was on the GPS (geology and planetary science) server. That's because our prof is from GPS, so he was quite excited about Titan, and even ended lecture earlier so he could show us the pictures.
So he sets up his computer to show pictures, except the projector won't turn on, so we end up looking at them on his tiny laptop screen sitting at the front of the room. He shows us a picture of Titan's surface that is dark grey and very low contrast and really rather boring. But he's practically jumping up and down and crying, "Look! There are rocks! And you can see the horizon!"
Meanwhile, he has an audience of chemists staring blankly back at him. One even asked, "Wait, so Titan is a planet -- oh, it's a moon -- that's covered in . . . ice?"
I was pretty amused, anyway. He explained afterwards, of course, how they thought they might not be able to see Titan's horizon because of haze in the atmosphere, and how they have no process to account for the formation of rocks on Titan since there are no impact craters (the cause of rocks on Mars) nor tectonics (the cause of rocks on Earth).
He did tie things into spectroscopy a bit. For one thing, he said they measured the temperature of Titan's surface through Doppler broadening (I think) and the winds through pressure broadening of peaks. I thought that was cool, and probably a big reason GPS people know spectroscopy. And at the end he said something really rapidly about photodissociation, but unfortunately only Raman understood it.
