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First Images From 50-km Enceladus Flyby
CheshireCatCO writes "The first pictures from yesterday's flyby of Enceladus are now public. At closest approach, Cassini was set spinning to cancel out the apparent motion of Enceladus so as to capture unsmeared images during the 40,000-mph flyby. Although it wasn't clear that this would work (errors in pointing could easily have made the cameras miss their targets), the maneuver panned out beautifully, producing spectacular images of the surface. Images show the 'tiger stripes' at the south pole, including at least one location that has been identified as a source of a jet, as well as considerable vertical relief, easily visible thanks to the low sun-angle near the south pole at present. Processed, enhanced images should follow shortly."
It's actually a pity that we're even spending money on this shit.
How many billion dollars did we spend to get one or two postcard photos? Typical fucking Americans.
For comparison, this is slightly less than 1/330th the budget to-date for the American war effort in Iraq. With a tenth of the war budget, we could send 3 or more likely 4 Cassini-class missions to every major planetary body in the solar system, and have the other 90% of the war budget to spend on eliminating world hunger 12 to 13 times over (I'm using the conservative estimate here and rounding down). Or whatever.
here we go again, another 'if there was no war in iraq we could...' post.
interestingly enough, most of the people who post this kind of tripe live in member countries of the un. had the un done their job in the middle east back in 90-91 there would be no iraq war today. instead the un conveniently left the us holding the bag again and skedaddled. if anything, americans should be eying up what they could be doing with the money they currently dole out to the un and disjoin themselves from this corrupt organization.
and the idea that simply throwing money at world hunger as a solution also shows how naive the poster is. a large chunk of today's world hunger is caused not by lack of food but by localized warlords who use civilians as slaves to their causes. food on the docks of these countries would more likely be used as a bartering tool to only increase their power and never find it's way to the mouths of the people that we keep talking about saving. little short of forcing our own societies template on these lands would work to fix this problem and we'd be left with another iraq-like situation with resentment, fear and militias just waiting until the 'friendly' forces have left so as to start another genocide between tribesmen and/or religious sects.
What's "useful" about space bases? Why does putting a bunch of smelly humans into a can and orbiting them around earth help science or mankind?
I love it. The "agenda" is destruction of terrorists, which is exactly what has been happening. Yet idiots such as yourself gripe about ONE GUY who no one even knows if he's alive or dead anyway, and who is not in any position to do anything about it.
(Yet your messiah, B. Hussein Obama, insists that all the "bad guys" from the 1993 WTC attacks are "incapacitated." Yeah, right).
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.