Cassini-Huygens Reaches Phoebe

Posted by michael on Friday June 11, 2004 @05:20AM from the bulls-eye dept.

Anonymous Explorer writes "The Cassini-Huygens probe is set to fly by the largest outer Saturn moon of Phoebe today. Cassini will be roughly 2000 km from the surface of Phoebe at 1:56 Pacific time Friday, June 11. Thats pretty darn close. The newest images of Phoebe are already thousands of times better than the previous ones taken by the Voyager 2 mission in 1981. Phoebe is interesting in that it maintains a retrograde orbit around Saturn. This has lead to the hypothesis that it is an ancient asteroid that has been captured by the gravitational pull from Saturn. Phoebe may provide some important insights into the composition of early building blocks of our planets. Phoebe was discovered in 1898 by American astronomer William Pickering. As always, discussion about this mission can be found at #cassini on irc.freenode.net."

1 of 178 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Re:When it's actually arriving by david.given · 2004-06-11 05:46 · Score: 0, Flamebait

Then you've never found timeanddate.com
No, I hadn't... but it still doesn't help. The website won't let me pick a timezone, it wants me to pick a city --- and I don't know where the hell PST is!
I did make a wild stab and fed in Los Angeles, being the only west-coast city I know in the US, and it came out the same, so I am reassured.
Seriously, guys, if you're talking to a world audience it's so much more convenient if you use UTC. Everyone knows how to convert UTC to and from their local time; it's considerably harder to convert to and from some bizarre local time half way round the planet.