NASA’s JPL’s Cassini space probe comes startling close to a rare stellar mystery today.

The Cassini space probe will soon complete its four-year primary mission to study Saturn, its rings, and its moons. Though close to its June completion, the Cassini mission’s operators will be busy today, as the spacecraft makes a very close flyby of one of Saturn’s more interesting moons, Enceladus.

What interests scientists most about Enceladus is the giant geyser at its south pole. While the moon itself is a mere 500 kilometers in diameter, the geyser, which is composed mostly of micrometer-sized ice particles, extends almost three times that distance into space. The geyser makes Enceladus one of the most geologically active bodies in our solar system.

Though the flyby seems daring, at one point coming as close as 50 kilometers to the surface near the moon’s equator, it will be four times that distance when it reaches the outskirts of the plume of vapor and particles. Though the ejected matter leaves the geyser at approximately 400 meters per second, the small size of the particles shouldn’t pose a problem to the space probe at the speed and altitude where it will encounter them.

The team hopes to use Cassini’s particle analysis equipment to get a better understanding of what kinds of materials are spewing from the planet’s interior. While some of the particles are pure water ice, other components include gases like carbon dioxide and methane. Analyzing the composition will help scientists quantify and understand any differences between the plume and the envelope of material that surrounds the entire moon and understand how the plume itself was formed.

Should today’s flyby conclude successfully, other, more daring flybys may be planned for the craft’s proposed extended mission cycle to begin in August of this year.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has created a movie explaining and illustrating Cassini’s mission and can be found here (flash multimedia).

Sure, we think the iMac is a nice machine, but sometimes you want to add a PCI card or six, and when the cheapest beslotted Mac starts at a whopping $2,799, mods like Hideo Takano’s Mac Pro Mini just make you wonder what could have been. Of course, there are no slots in this bad boy either since it’s based around a stock Mac mini with a 2.33GHz processor upgrade, but it is a mighty impressive effort — actually, check out Hideo’s whole Mac Mod Lab site for even more sick Mini mods.

[Via Unplgged]

Sure, we think the iMac is a nice machine, but sometimes you want to add a PCI card or six, and when the cheapest beslotted Mac starts at a whopping $2,799, mods like Hideo Takano’s Mac Pro Mini just make you wonder what could have been. Of course, there are no slots in this bad boy either since it’s based around a stock Mac mini with a 2.33GHz processor upgrade, but it is a mighty impressive effort — actually, check out Hideo’s whole Mac Mod Lab site for even more sick Mini mods.

[Via Unplgged]

A district attorney in Rockwall County, Dallas, is under scrutiny from the FBI due to a PC he built as a backup server — using office money. Ray Sumrow claims he was using the system for business, but the “server” actually seems to be a tricked out gaming rig, featuring two hard drives, seven fans, high end graphics and sound cards, WiFi, and cables which “glow under ultraviolet light.” Rod Gregg, the FBI examiner on the case says, “I would not configure a backup computer in that way,” and added, “When I saw that, I did not think of anything related to a government agency.” Charges of forgery, theft, and records tampering have been made against Mr. Sumrow due to his use of the district attorney’s “fee fund,” which is meant to be used for office supplies or employee salaries. Testimony will take place through the week, and prosecutors expect to hear how it was imperative to Mr. Sumrow’s legal work that he, “Frag the crap out of dudes.”

[Via Penny Arcade]