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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.
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!
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 ***.
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.
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
Cyberspace is a much richer and promising environment.
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?
"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
Didn't you get the memo? Mars will always be 20 years away and so far that schedule has been consistent for past 50 years. We no longer talk about the Moon because if we did (it is only 3 days away) then someone has to come up with some serious money to build a transfer vehicle and lander now. Nobody from Musk to NASA wants to do that so they present Mars plans (and let some other smucks 20 years into the future to come up with money for transfer vehicle and lander).
mfwright@batnet.com
AFAIK a Falcon 9 Heavy rocket can do a manned orbital lunar mission in a single launch. The Russians could do it with the Proton rocket (Zond program), with technology available in the 1960s, and the Falcon 9 Heavy has more launch capacity than the Proton. The first Falcon 9 Heavy rocket should launch this year or next.
Developing the lander is easy. SpaceX already designed the SuperDracos for the Dragon V2 capsule. First launch for the capsule supposed to happen next year. The transfer vehicle doesn't sound particularly hard to design either if you start with the Falcon 9 Heavy upper stage and the Dragon V2 capsule.
PS: a manned lunar landing mission could be done with a simultaneous launch of two rockets (can't remember if you need two Falcon 9 Heavies or you can do it with a Falcon 9 Heavy and a regular Falcon 9). This should be possible once SpaceX has their Texas launch site operating in addition to their existing Cape Canaveral launch site. The cost of the rockets for the launch could be quite small if SpaceX reused the lower stages from prior launches.
ULA could also pull it off in theory if they wanted to. The original EELV designs included the Delta 4 Heavy and Atlas 5 Heavy configurations which should have enough payload capacity as well. They would need to modify the launch sites for manned launches and re-certify their launchers for manned missions. But the Atlas 5 is supposed to launch the Boeing capsule for NASA in a couple of years anyway.