Cassini's Iapetus Flyby

cupofjoe writes "The Jet Propulsion Laboratory is reporting on the Cassini spacecraft's recent close flyby of the Saturnian moon Iapetus, highlighting images taken from distances 100 times closer than the Voyager 2 flyby in 1981. Near real-time images were shown to Cassini mission team members in a presentation at JPL yesterday, during which a pre-recorded message from Arthur C. Clarke was played to the audience. Clarke wished them luck on the flyby, reminding all present that he had included a pretty accurate description of Iapetus in the original 1968 text of "2001: A Space Odyssey", years before Voyager made its flyby."

Comments

Re:Even if it's a boast

[kamapuaa]

According to the Wikipedia article, the extent that he predicted was Geostationary orbits (although he wasn't the first to describe the idea, nor was he an influence on the actual development of the satellite), and the extent of his pop culture contributions was assisting Kubrick with 2001, and then later novelizing the movie.

As a kid I liked the 2001 novel, I read some of his other works. Mostly they just described ridiculous nerd utopias without any real characters or character development, and constantly dove into his rants about his random list of pet peeves. The quite frequent racism was grating. Basically the guy is a crazy old coot who nobody would remember except that he was associated with Kubrick's out-dated blockbuster.