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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."
wikipedia has a great bit of information on the history of this project including a section called "Plutonium power source and controversy".
steal this sig
"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.
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/instruments- cassini-iss.cfm
:)
:P
"Cassini's higher-resolution camera is able to see a penny, 1.5 cm (0.5 in) across, from a distance of nearly 4 km (2.5 mi)."
Sounds like the cameras has some potential, at least
Oh, and NASA, as always, rock at converting metric to imperial...
1.5 cm = 0.59 in
4 km = 2.48 miles
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.
"The photo sequence began around 12:30 a.m., 18 minutes or so after Cassini finished a 96-minute rocket firing to brake into orbit around Saturn. Streaking just above the rings at speeds greater than 50,000 mph, Cassini's narrow-angle camera took a series of snapshots, opening its shutter for just five milliseconds per picture to avoid blurring. Each picture was separated from those on either side by about 600 miles because of Cassini's extreme velocity."
"It takes us about a minute to take a picture and so in the time we shutter the exposure, read out the camera and get ready to take a picture again, we have crossed a thousand kilometers."
They never had a chance to get a close up of the debris in the rings. In fact, it would take a significant effort, timing it just right, to do so; and, they would risking damage by exposing the camera lens to any dust in the path. If you remember, they were turning Cassini so the big dish pointed in the direction of travel to act as a shield against any small objects in their path, as they crossed the rings.
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).
Yikes - how many bonghits before *that* post??
There is no such thing as 'chocohol' or 'workahol'.
It's not several billion - it's only 900 million miles away, plus or minus 2 AUs or so. ;)
Cassini TRAVELED several billion miles to get there - its path looks like an archimedes spiral because of the multiple slingshot maneuvers it used to gain speed. This is also why it took so long to get there.
(plonk!)
Yep, it is, according to dictionary.com:
Saturnian ( P ) Pronunciation Key (s-tûrn-n, s-)
adj.
Of or relating to the planet Saturn or to its supposed astrological influence.
Archaic. Of or relating to the god Saturn or his reign.
>insert witty sig file here
Try and imagine, a sentence, with lots of commas, some in places they shouldn't be, going on and on, far past the boundaries of normal sentences, standing tall like a great dark god of sentences, like a toilet full melodramatic examples, and then when you think it might end and the commas stop and you yearn for a period, more come like a never ending journey towards a final ending.
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.