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Deep Space 1 Completes Comet Fly-by

Posted by michael on from the license-and-registration-please dept.

Saint Aardvark writes: "All right...Space.com is reporting here that NASA's Deep Space 1 probe successfully made it through Comet Borrelly -- pretty good for a spacecraft using up the last of its fuel, 'way past its expected lifetime, doing something it wasn't designed to do'. About 30 pix are being downloaded right now, and there's a press conference planned for Tuesday. In the meantime, read NASA's press release here. Way to go, DS-1 and NASA!"

2 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. NASA hype makes lemonade out of lemons by kingdon · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It cracks me up the way that whenever NASA is running out of funding for a mission, they come up with some daring plunge which is supposed to lead to the death of the spacecraft. Remember Galileo, which took a pass at Io and was supposed to be killed by the radiation? Well, it has been damaged by the radiation, but it keeps on ticking (and keeps on spending money :-)). Not that NASA is wrong to do this - you need to move on to the next mission some time, and trying a riskier mission to get some last data is a way to go out with a bang, but the part which is amusing is when they talk all about their gutsy move without saying that the probe would have been turned off anyway due to lack of money.

  2. This is a VGT (Very Good Thing) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful
    What do you know, I can't log into slashdot, DOH! This'll have to be an AC:


    While we in the technology industry have never really doubted NASA's ability, this shines good on NASA in the public forum. To me, many in the general public view NASA as something that once had a purpose, but now is struggling to get their missions to work right, etc. (which is far from the truth). But something like this tells the world "Hey, so we forgot to convert back to metric... everyone makes mistakes... look at this!". NASA is still very much an important entity. Look at all of the advances made because of the space program. If anything, hopefully this will serve to deter (if only a little bit) the budget cuts NASA has been facing as of late.


    Just a thought...