Cassini Probe Has Camera Problems

xX_sticky_Xx writes "The BBC is reporting that the last billion dollar NASA probe, Cassini, (enroute to Saturn) is suffering from an unknown source of contamination on its narrow field camera. NASA has attempted to alleviate the contamination, which is causing a haze to appear around images, by "defrosting" it, with so far limited success. Another attempt will be made in January. If this problem can't be resolved this will be extremely disappointing. Cassini is set to expand our knowledge of Saturn more than Galileo did for Jupiter."

Comments

The man behind the name

[moniker_21]

So after reading the article (I know, rare for a slashdotter) I started wondering who they named the probe after. Turns out they named it after a 17th century astronomer who was the first to observe Saturn's four moons.

Some more info on the man behind the name of the probe can be found here.

Man that sucks...

[bteeter]

After all the risks that were taken to put this thing in space - it would be a shame for it to go to waste. (Risk = putting 75 LBS of plutonium within a few miles of crashing down onto the earth.)

NASA is having a rough time with it lately. There have been a lot of pretty expensive and embarasing failures. If NASA were a private enterprise I'd suspect a management shakeup. Since it is a government body - I'm not sure what can be done. Clearly something should be done...

Take care,

Brian
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We are almost out of Free Palm m100's...
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Re:Lens cap...

[Feng]

Slightly offtopic but there have been cases of space probes having lens cap problems. In the 70's a Russian probe (Venera, IIRC) landed on Venus and returned photos of complete darkness. In the end it was determined that its lens cap melted on to the camera.

A subsequent Venera had an improved lens cap which popped off on landing. The funny part is the lens cap landed in front of the probe, where a spring loaded arm called a "penetrometer" was supposed to spring out from the probe and sample the soil around it...

...You guessed it. The penetrometer ended up sampling the lens cap which was lying where the arm was supposed to plunge in.

Re:Source of contamination

[nusuth]

Maybe you're just used to using some method of inertialess propulsion to get around, in which case we'd all be really interested to hear about it.

Check woodward engine, you might find interesting. See http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/bpp/ (sorry I don't know how to make those clickable, look for research proposal about mach's principle) for credibility, james woodward's homepage http://chaos.fullerton.edu/Woodward.html for more info.

For all too lazy to floow links guys out there, woodward claims to have detected transient mass effects, which might be used for propellantless propulsion. The idea is sound and experimental confirmation is present, but the experimental values are a few orders of magnitude less than predicted. It is unclear whether the theory or experiment design is incorrect right now. Both NASA and Mr. Woodward is looking into it, though the results have been painfully slow to arrive.

Re:They have three YEARS to solve the problem

[JabberWokky]

Okay, most of the folks here seem to be bashing NASA and jumping to conclusions that the probe is lost.

Regardless, this is an *experiment* - we leaned *something* here. Either about materials in extreme cold and vacuum for years, if it is a NASA "error", or about the nature of interplanetary space if it is some sort of dust. Grant you, it's not pretty pictures, but I don't think the public even cares about pretty pictures anymore.

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Evan