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NASA's Voyager 2 Flew By Saturn 35 Years Ago Today (space.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: Thirty-five years ago today, a NASA spacecraft got an up-close look at beautiful, enigmatic Saturn. On Aug. 25, 1981, the Voyager 2 probe zoomed within 26,000 miles (41,000 kilometers) of the ringed planet's cloud tops. The discoveries made by Voyager 2 -- and by its twin, Voyager 1, which had flown past Saturn nine months earlier -- reshaped scientists' understanding of the Saturn system and planted the seed for NASA's Cassini mission, which began orbiting the ringed planet in 2004, NASA officials said. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 launched a few weeks apart in 1977, tasked with performing a "grand tour" of the solar system's big planets -- Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The two spacecraft accomplished that goal, eyeing all four gaseous worlds up close, and also studying 48 of their moons. (Voyager 1 flew past Jupiter and Saturn, while Voyager 2 had close encounters with all four planets.) The Voyagers weren't the first spacecraft to fly by Saturn; that distinction belongs to NASA's Pioneer 11 probe, which did so in 1979. But the Voyagers broke a lot of new ground; they discovered four new Saturn moons, for example, and revealed an incredible diversity of landscapes on satellites such as Dione, Tethys and Iapetus, NASA officials said. August 25th appears to be a good day for nerds. You can view some out-of-this-world photos from NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 probes here.
Not as newsworthy as Voyager 1's interstellar data, but Voyager 2 is also heading out of the solar system on it's "Interstellar Mission", it is expected to be able to provide measurements of interstellar plasma density & temperature once it's out there.
To chief engineer Fritz Posterman.
After all these years, Voyager 2 is only 15 light-hours from Earth (Voyager 1 is 18 lh). Even if the newest probes may go somewhat faster, reaching the closest star (4.2 light-years) is a long way to go.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
These were amazing missions that provided a TON of data and knowledge for the price.
With modern tech, do the same missions, same planets, new info!
Great songs will be written about all the machines that steeled themselves against the hazards of space travel in order to expand the understanding of their overlords who hunkered down safely in their bunkers.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
but 35 years!?
Explain how one can perceive "obvious subtle" overtones.
Please explain this thoroughly and be *** specific ***.
Too many people on the internet post anonymous stuff like this then just leave, and don't explain their position.
Please be *** specific ***.
He thinks he's making some incredibly wry point about "sjw"s no doubt, and how they seem to take exception with things. He's no doubt congratulating himself on how hilarious he is right at this moment.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
i still miss a mission to uranus. (and neptune, of course)
i mean proper mission, like cassini, not just flyby.
This is nice and all, but it leaves out the important story - what kind of shirt was the spokeman wearing when he made the announcement? We all know, from empirical experience, that this issue is far more important than any mind-shattering science that could have been done that day.
If you can force a rocket scientist, celebrating the accomplishment of a lifetime, to cry and grovel and beg forgiveness on international TV for wearing a shirt, you are not unempowered.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
As usual, "today" means "yesterday" on Slashdot. And without "today" meaning "today" this story is pretty much worthless (we all knew about the fly-by).
Better yet would have been to give us a "tomorrow" or "day after next" story, so we could have planned our fly-by parties.
Oh I wish I were a Slashdot editor. I could still live the life of a slacker, but get paid for it.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I can understand celebrations at 25 years and 50 etc
or 32 for binary freaks
I can tell you specifically what he means in a general sense. It was sarcasm.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
V'ger is pleased with the Creator and would like them to run more missions to the larger planets.
Growing up in the 1960s I thought by 1981 we'd have colonies on Mars as well as the moon. We'd have a massive centrifugal space station orbiting earth and by 2016 we'd start to fly craft in outer-space the size of an aircraft carrier. Plus we'd all be wearing v-neck sweaters, silver boots, and have diner out of a tube;) I guess it was unrealistic for a bunch of reasons. First was we didn't appreciate how far ahead Werner von Braun was and the fact that the brilliance of Nazi engineers was so far ahead of its time, evil as it's original usage was. Nor how expensive it really was to operate single use Saturn Vs and shuttles. Really we were not staged for more advancement, instead we needed to perfect what they started over decades. Secondly, we didn't realize the much of the planets around us are basically deserts with not much for raw materials to drive commercial development. If the moon was covered with bauxite, ice, platinum, and uranium then there would be a compelling comical driver as well as a way to stage space travel from there. But on the surface at least the moon is useless and Mars isn't exactly a gold mine either. Oh well, maybe SpaceX change change the whole dynamic.
My grandfather was the Voyager Spacecraft Systems Manager, and when I was a kid he used to bring me so much fascinating pictures and things from work.
Limit them to a single term in a specific office.
A nice idea but then you end up with a bunch of people in office that don't even know where the restroom is much less how to get anything done. If someone is doing a good job I'm fine with them serving more than one term. However I don't think they need to serve more than 4 terms in the House, 2 terms as president or two terms as Senator. Churn just for the sake of churn is pointless. But I don't think we need people serving in congress for multiple decades either.
But, we can start by removing party affiliation from the ballot.
Will never ever happen. Waste of time to even ponder. HOWEVER it would be possible to eliminate gerrymandering which would have a similarly positive effect on turnover and in keeping extremists out of office.
[*] I am using the formula dleta_t=(sqrt(1 - (v/c)^2) + poetic_license(liberal_dose)).
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Well now I am confused (and also surprised)...
Actually, Houston was chosen because land was cheap, and because of the proximity of the site to the canal passage to the Gulf of Mexico, to allow shipping large rocket boosters to the cape by barge.
Of course, they ended up not manufacturing large rocket boosters at Johnson, so that turned out to be unnecessary and irrelevant. You might suggest that this requirement, that the site have barge accessibility to the Atlantic, was put in place for no reason other than to make the Texas site competitive. But, who would argue that?
Me not know Chief Engineer. What tribe he from?
He smoke-um peace pipe?
"Value Signalling" requires no defense, for the SJW crowd, all you have to do is indicate you have the "correct" opinions. Having a logical justification or rationale for holding the opinion is superfluous. Ut's enough just to show you have the opinion to get your credibility