The Enceladus Game
Enceladus is my favourite moon of the solar system.
NASA has given us this little game to play... you and I can travel to Enceladus without having to waste months or years in space, we don't have to suffer atrophy, we don't have to worry about being a long way from home, we don't have to worry about the foibles of our fellow astronouts getting on our nerves, we don't have to be concerned whether we can make it back home again, we can play the Enceladus Game from the comfort of our homes and armchairs.
To play this game all you have to do is click on the image and move the moon any way you like:
Why do I love this little moon so much?
Well I fell in love with Enceladus when I first heard about it being squeezed so hard by the gravity of Saturn and its companion moon "Dione" that like all true Aussies I just fell in love with the underdog. I'm a sucker for the little guy up against the big guy, or the little girl up against the whole world.
These two bodies, huge old Saturn and the rather small Dione, pull against tiny Enceladus so much that it spurts geysers of liquid into space and the liquid it spurts like a squeezed lemon forms one of Saturns rings. This is Saturn's "E" ring. I also love Saturn for its may rings: what a stunner!
The other thing I love about Enceladus is that no-one pronounces the name correctly. Or, put it another way, people disagree as to what is the correct way to pronounce the name:
Let's try this:
en-sel-ahd-dus or en-sell-a-dous ?
or even (British), en-sel- ay-dus ?
Take your pick, because wherever you go you will find someone who says it the other way, just as you will find when you play some of the links under "enceladus pronunciation"
However you may pronounce its name, I simply cannot explain why tiny little Enceladus, has taken my fancy against all the other moons of Saturn or Jupiter, and these two big guys have lots of moons, far too many to keep up with.
So a long time ago I settled for the fact that I can't go to Enceladus, I can't ski there, I can't explore its under-ice ocean in a submersible like James Cameron's "Deepsea Challenger" and even for someone as rich as James, getting his Deepsea Challenger to Enceladus is a bit of an ask.
So I settled for staying at home in the comfort of my living room playing games which NASA sends us for free! Such as this Enceladus Game, or the Perseverance Game. And very soon the "Ingenuity Game" when the first flight of a human made flying machine will explore the surface of Mars controlled by a program onboard the Perseverance rover itself because there's too much time delay between us and Mars to allow it to be remotely controlled directly from Earth.
This is also a conundrum, because if Ingenuity is being controlled by a computer program on board Perseverance, then really it is actually being controlled from Earth "in advance", isn't it?
Another thing about this Enceladus Game, it hasn't got any rules. It's not like chess or poker, it's not like scrabble or monopoly. You can't place a bet on it. You can't win or lose! It's a bit like solitaire, you play it on your own. The only thing you can do with this game is to ponder.
What a game!
Thank you NASA.
pt
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