NEWS PRIME AND REHASH.
The first-ever “exploration” tour of Titan, the largest of Saturn's moons, was announced this past week by the European Space Agency and went all but unknown among the pulsing mass of other newsworthy events of the week.
The actual visit took place on Christmas Day, December 25, 2004.
Let's see, now... concerning our news coverage of the event went there was something more about one or more of the various troubles haunting Michael Jackson during the past year or two. Some of that was a suspected of some roiling of the back waters. Then, there was the compelling contrast of tense, active news reporting still more deaths and missing persons from the Indian Ocean tsunami; there was much re-telling about the the doctor waiting for his wife in a restaurant which she was outside in their car - very dead. The entertainment world was deciding who ought to and who ought not to win the upcoming “Golden Globe Awards” which will be handed out Sunday night.. We had a massive mud slide in California; tornadoes along the Arkansas-Oklahoma border and an avalanche of snow, ice, rock and timber in an outback area of Utah with five skiers on the “missing” list. There were floods in Ohio and L.A.; a major industrial fire in Indiana and an gas explosion in South Carolina. Washington D.C. showed more concern over the forty million dollars being spent on the 2nd Inaugural festivities for George W. Bush than on security for that event. But, that quieted down quickly when it was pointed out that the final bill of the Bill Clinton's 2nd celebrations added up to well over that amount.
This was also the week when Prince Harry happened to attend a private costume party and made the now obvious blunder of dressing up as a rather grubby looking chap wearing, on one arm, a tacky imitation of a Nazi arm band bearing Rudyard Kipling's favorite swastika emblem. The London tabloids hit hapless Harry heavily with pictorial punishment and it added to the stock of such semi-sick stuff the sleaze sorters love Stateside. Great hullabaloo about it being a thoughtless insult to the people of the Holocaust but it's drifting away slowly. Prince Harry plans to stay out of the public eye until he is de-palaced in the next few weeks to start his career as a officer in the Royal Army at Sandhurst.
Meanwhile, there was the moon Titan and the “Huygens Probe. The European built space craft managed to take over three hundred photographs on the way down and on the surface. Those shots published thus far have been few but of good quality, detail and interesting content. The entire visit lasted a little over two hours hours because limited by the short extent of battery life. The terrain of the Titan Moon was very much like that of Mars with some areas displayed a selection of good-sized rocks, widely scattered over a fruitless plain but plentiful enough to make a quarry and rock crushing business a possibility when we get the right machines up there – or, out there - with batteries strong enough to run it all a bit longer - days, at least, instead of hours. (C'mon, Battery Bunny, you can do better than that!)
Another photograph showed lands contoured which indicates the presence of fluids on the Titan. The audio portions of the report knock the knocked any watery idea aside by pointing out that the temperature on Titan is in 'way below zero - like 204 degrees below - and if any fluids did exist there they might well have been liquidized gases of various sorts. So, so you can put a “Hold”on those fancy marina plans you had drawn up. Keep them ready. We'll probably have to work out a deal with OPEC.
The exploration of Titan is in progress. It is underway. The initial step has been a small one, but it serves well as an early chapter in our development of our final frontier - space. For the time being, we had best pay attention, it appears, doesn't it, to merely staying alive to be ready, willing able to do it all some day when our other events don't override and obscure it?
A.L.M. January 16, 2005 [c722wds]
