Galileo And Cassini Team Up

Bearpaw writes, "Trying to squeeze the last possible bit of use out of Galileo, NASA may team it up with the Saturn-bound Cassini for a joint mission. " The two will be perform some joint observations of the Jupiter system, as well as doing separate missions on the Jupiter system, including Ganymede as well. Hats off to the folks behind Galileo, whose official mission ended in 1997, but has kept on going.

Comments

Pushing too much

[Eccles]

Trying to squeeze the last possible bit of use out of Galileo

My first thought when I read this? "I hope they don't expect too much, he's been dead for several hundred years..."

NASA success, NASA failures

[MAXOMENOS]

With all the media attention on the failures of NASA, it's good to see NASA's great successes: Cassini, Galileo, Voyager, Pathfinder, Viking, and most of all Apollo. When people talk about cutting the NASA budget, we can point them to these; and when they ask, "Yeah, but what did it do to save the environment," you can ask them, "How much are you willing to pay for knowledge that isn't immediately useful?"

Why missions work, and fail

[buckethead]

The contrast between Galileo's success and the recent tragic failures of the Mars probes is striking, and informative. While NASA administrator Dan Goldin's "faster, cheaper, better" mantra played well for congress what it really meant was that deep space exploration was stretched even thinner than it had been. Galileo had an adequate budget, that allowed for actually checking out the spacecraft before launch. A budget big enough budget that enough quality ground control was available to make the recovery from the antenna fault possible

The recent Mars missions had a third the staff for three times the probes compared to the last series of Mars probes (the immensely popular pathfinder.) Is it any wonder that drastically understaffed and underfunded projects experienced failures? They didn't even have enough money to install equipment to transmit telemetry that would have allowed NASA to determine what caused the Polar lander's failure.

On a long duration mission millions of miles from home, redundancy is a critical issue. This takes at least a little bit of money. The only time that redundancy on individual probes can be discounted is when they are very simple and there are a lot of them. There have been proposals of this kind, largely ignored by NASA.

If you want successful space probes, give NASA the resources it needs to do the job. And don't throw billions away on the space shuttle. If we wanted a private space industry, it would take one thing: the announcement that the government was taking bids on a SSTO, in quantity, and that excess vehicles could be used by private industry.

You'd have to stand back to avoid being hit by an entire new industry. Like with aviation in the early part of this century, gov't can play a part by doing research and creating an initial need to be met by private industry. (Early military and mail service contracts.) Once its started- and the banks assured that the companies will make money- you're off and running. Airplanes were soon being produced for cargo and passengers, and now the airline industry is a multi-multi-billion/year industry.

When NASA was NACA, it did this well. Nasa should go back to its roots, do great research, but leave business to business.