Slashdot Mirror


Cassini's Best Discoveries of Saturn and Its Moons (theverge.com)

Loren Grush, writing for The Verge: Early tomorrow morning, NASA scientists will say goodbye to their Cassini spacecraft -- a hardy probe the size of a school bus that has been orbiting the Saturn system for the last 13 years. Launched in 1997, Cassini has spent a whopping 20 years in space, lasting through two mission extensions while going above and beyond what it was designed to do. But tomorrow, the probe will dive into Saturn's atmosphere, where it will break apart and cease operating. It's a sad time for the scientists who have worked on this mission for years, but also a triumphant one: Cassini leaves an impressive legacy of scientific discovery in its wake. Here's a nice video to go with it.

4 of 25 comments (clear)

  1. And in about two or three years... by Jhon · · Score: 4, Funny

    The floating, lighter than air Saturnians shall respond in force to our raining down radioactive death upon them.

    1. Re:And in about two or three years... by pr0t0 · · Score: 4, Funny

      For years their mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.

      --
      I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
    2. Re:And in about two or three years... by argStyopa · · Score: 2

      You may have not intended to appear plagaristic, as pretty much every nerd should recognize it, but sad to not attribute this genuinely funny comment to its ACTUAL author Douglas Adams.

      (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. A passage about a pair of warring alien races, the Vl'Hurg and the G'gugvuntt, that wanted to launch an attack on Earth:
      "...Eventually of course, after their Galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realized that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own Galaxy...
      For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog..")

      --
      -Styopa
  2. Re:This is the kind of stuff that makes America gr by Gavagai80 · · Score: 2

    Cassini is a joint NASA, ESA and Italian Space Agency project. It's what makes humans great, not America.

    --
    This space intentionally left blank