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Triana Mothballed
jessemckinney writes "Apparently, the US congress of last year cut the funding of this great satellite project after it was finished. It will now take millions of dollars (us) to refuel and recalibrate the instruments. Why do politicians have to kill great science projects for their own political vandettas?"
Triana was originally built as a political favor. I won't mention to whom, but you might guess by the nickname it was given of "Goresat".
There was originally no science planned. Only when scrutiny increased to it were some basic instruments added to make the excuse of it being a research tool float.
Just a heads up, the only thing Triana would have really done was take pictures of the earth for posting on a website to 'make people feel better about the earth'. For a working alternative, please visit the NOAA website where legions of weather satellites already do this 24x7.
Triana was a waste of a rocket launch. Hopefully the chassis can be adapted to perform some real science.
YOur point is true, but this particular item is a 'screw everything ever associated with Gore' from the republicans. The housing cost will cost more(eventually) then sending it up.
Not to mention how little of a percentage the nasa budget is, but it still gets cut
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
NOAA-NCAR-CIMSS -ask someone that does anything sorta kinda related to satellite meteorology and works for one of those acronyms and they'd tell you all about it. Millions of dollars spent for some half-ass idea Al Gore had. Money that could have been spent on real science.
"Vandettas" aside, (they sang back-up for Martha, right?), this project doesn't inspire a huge amount of confidence in me. It started out as a stunt by Al Gore, and while scientists may have come up with useful uses for it (which I'm not qualified to judge), I'd be a lot more enthusiastic about a project that was designed to do something useful in the first place.
My sense this is like the biology experiments they do on the space shuttle, something I am qualified to judge. They're worth doing, given that the shuttle is already going but they're hardly a justification for the shuttle program.
As an aside, which may make you feel better, I heard a talk recently by one of the leaders of the Chandra telescope project. Asked about the security of funding, he said that while legislators aren't going to give more money, they pretty much all appreciate astronomy and space and the stream of money isn't in jeopardy at all.
Sounds typically short-sighted. At least we *know* the carrier fleets are an effective defense mechanism and an even better lever for US Foreign policy.
We already saw this, btw.
As for the project, there was clearly nothing vaguely scientific in the original plan but it was subsequently expanded to include a whole host of "scientific" things to encourage its approval. Of course, with the increase in things it needed to accomplish, the price went up. It's hardly surprising that a pet project like this got cut.
Dancin Santa
I don't know the value of the other projects they put on this bird, but Gore's picture from space was sentimental but stupid.
I stll think we should do it, but we should never have spent $120M on the satellite and more on the now scrubbed launch.
We already have cameras taking pictures of the earth all the time. The weather sats and other instruments are constantly recording the earth.
As such it would cost a very small amount to develop software to integrate those pictures to generate an image of what the planet would look like from any point, including L1. With enough work you could get it so you could not tell the difference.
Yes, it wouldn't be "real" to some people. But it would be true, and that's real enough for me.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
If you're running the House, and your party recommends drilling, lumber, mining, burning fossil fuels, all in a valiant attempt to spur the economy, you probably don't want people to see what damage all this "economic recovery" is doing. Particularly with the difficulty encountered in trying to explore (not even drill, yet) for oil in ANWR
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...because those pesky scientists would most likely use it to gather evidence about inconvenient issues like global warming and pollution. In the mean time, the money is much better spent on that trillion dollar orbiting erector set.