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Cassini-Huygens Reaches Orbit Around Saturn
Mick Ohrberg writes "The probe Cassini-Huygens is now officially in orbit around Saturn. Last nights' retro-burn was completed according to plan, down to the second, which in and of itself is an amazing feat, considering all data received is 1h24m old, as well as 900 million miles away. I must say, it was fairly exciting to watch the webcast, and see the signal fade behind the A-ring, and all but disappear behind the B-ring - all in (somewhat delayed) real-time. The SOI (Saturn Orbit Insertion) also saw Cassini-Huygens whisk by Saturn at around 68,000 mph at an altitude of about 12,000 miles from the cloud tops - the closest to the gas giant the probe will ever be during its planned 4-year mission, for instance the much awaited Huygens mission to Titan."
"It feels awfully good to be in orbit around the lord of the rings," said Charles Elachi, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "It's going to be a huge leap in our understanding of the Saturnian system.""This has just been an incredible ride," he said. "This wasn't NASA going into orbit around Saturn, it's the Earth going into orbit around Saturn because 17 countries made this happen. This is the way exploration should be done: by the Earth."
if only we could do more things like this
SHE does throw dice.
Try and imagine this small piece of machine, an artificial eye, open to the wonders of our solar system, falling through the infinite depths of space, so that we can forget for a moment, all the troubles and tribulations around us, the cold steel and the raging fire and look beyond the physical confines of what makes us human and gaze in awe at this small contraption carrying a message of hope, of peace, of our thirst for knowledge in a never ending journey towards everything that is unknown.
Rapid Nirvana
You know its really easy to take for granted the fact that in the last 50 years we have gone from a confined world to launching interplanetary probes billions of miles away. I think we are all a little desensitized from watching too much star trek/star wars and setting our expectations way too high. It really struck me this weekend when i was sitting on the beach with my girlfriend, relaxing and said "the cassini probe is going into orbit around saturn this week." She just smiled, because shes not that geeky, but really, never have humans ever been able to say something like that in matter-of-fact conversation. Now its the norm. Hooray for us:)
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No matter how thin you slice it, its still baloney.
This is a great day for science and I'm glad that we didn't give into the protesters back in 1997 (to prevent the mission) and 1999 (to stop Cassini from flying past Earth on its way back to Saturn after a gravity slingshot around Venus).
1900kbps (kilobits per second) = 1.9 Mbps (megabits per second). That comes to roughly 237kBps (kilebytes per second). My cable modem at home downloads (normally) at around 350kBps, so that still sounds pretty snappy to me.
Yes, I realize I should know this one already, but I can't seem to recall ever hearing his name actually said out loud and it aggravates me that I mentally stumble through every instance of his name in print.
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.
I wasn't claiming that there was any problem with sending plutonium to Saturn. I was just pointing out that there isn't "plenty of plutonium" out there.
Is Cassini the last of the billion-dollar deep-space probes? I don't see much else funded. Theres and on-again, off-again flyby to Pluto next decade. The Mercury probe Messenger was axed in the current White House budget. The next four launch-cycles to Mars are being worked on. But these are relatively inexpensive, small things in the couple hundred million range. Maybe a few more lunar and comet missions in the works too.
The previous NASA administrator Goldin promoted the faster-cheaper-smaller (and less reliable) probe model. I guess the initial Hubble troubles and the decade-long Galileo & Cassini projects spooked him out. At least Cassini will last for 4 to 10 years.
My sibling poster handled the comment about independent action; I'll just add a thought on the delay factor, in general. I'm not familiar with Cassini's design, but I work on geosynchronous satellites, including their ascents to orbit. Most designs are capable of stored commands, which allow the ground to program a maneuver in advance. These programmed maneuvers can be time-tagged to specific epochs. So, as long as you have a solid, synchronized timing source on the satellite/probe, you're able to get the maneuvers to come off at any time you want with relative ease. Of course, the trick is knowing the correct time for a particular maneuver. For this, orbital analysts have fairly sophisticated tools and the smarts to use them. Yes, it is all in the planning.
...they passed through the ring plane, in the huge gap between the F and G rings.
Passing through the rings themselves would likely have been disastrous.