View Single Post
  #14  
Old October 23rd 17, 11:42 PM posted to talk.politics.misc,sci.space.policy,alt.politics,alt.politics.trump,soc.culture.usa
Mr. B1ack
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 7
Default STUPID To Crash Cassini Probe

On Sun, 22 Oct 2017 01:12:39 -0700, Fred J. McCall
wrote:

Mr. B1ack wrote:

On Sat, 21 Oct 2017 17:24:52 -0400, "M.I.Wakefield"
wrote:

"Mr. B1ack" wrote in message
...

Still, he's a conservative ... so appeal to the penny-pincher aspect you
usually see with conservatives. Crashing Cassini was A BIG WASTE OF MONEY.
I don't know if he thinks the universe is only 6000 years old, but he WILL
understand WASTED $$$.

No, Cassini was well into bonus time ... the original mission was supposed
to end in 2008.


Irrelevant ... the only "problem" was the fuel supply. It could
have been put in a parking orbit and continued to return lots
of good data for many more years.


There is no such thing as a 'parking orbit' in a system like Saturn's.



Gee ... so those moons are poised to fall like next tuesday
or something ???

Yes, there ARE stable orbits around Saturn. There are
stable orbits around the larger moons too.


They looked at doing that and came to the conclusion that they
couldn't be sure it wouldn't be perturbed into hitting something we
might care about someday.


I think they just wanted to crash it.

And 'collecting data' is the expensive bit. Requires time on the DSN
and a dedicated crew to collect and analyze data. They're going to be
analyzing the data they already have for years and years.


Cassini had gobs of onboard memory, a lot of it
for holding high-rez photos until the antenna was
pointed in the right direction again. Data from lots
of the other instruments would be a relative flyspeck
compared to high-rez photos ... you could stash a
HUGE amount and then, at your leisure and
convenience, download it every so often.

So the 'expense' aspect is a false flag.

And when don't scientists want even MORE data,
even if they already have a lot of it ? A longer-term
record of magnetic fields alone would have been
very interesting.

NASA tends to over-engineer ... Opportunity is closing in on 14 years on
Mars ... a mission that was scheduled for 3 months.


And they made use of it the whole time. Even its relatively
limited data was STILL useful/interesting data. Don't bitch
when your craft delivers dividends. And who knows, the
winds may eventually free Spirit. If so, USE it. Hell, let
some college use it, train tomorrows space-probe drivers.


And how does this team of amateurs talk to it? Telepathy, perhaps?


Rent dish time, like everyone else.

A few schools have their own dishes.

BTW, most 'religious'/conservative people are NOT young-earth/no-evo
ultra-fundies. The few that are tend to get all the press, makes them SEEM
like a bigger bloc.

They tend to be loud about it.


They like to thump their bibles really loud as if that's
proving something ....

But it ain't. Ignore them. Starved of fame they'll slowly
wilt and die, become the mulch of history like the flat-
earthers.


I'm waiting for you folks who don't even have religion as an excuse
for your ignorance to "slowly wilt and die", but it just never seems
to happen. The universe appears to love stupidity.



IQ requires defeating a lot of entropy :-)

I think those in charge of Cassini fell behind
that curve and wasted a still-valuable asset.



Like viewing stars and planets, more local 'truths' often depend on what
wavelength filter you view them through :-)

Speaking of which ... if you have the right combination of binoculars and
darkness, you can try and see the planet Uranus ... a blue-green dot
currently in the constellation of Pisces ... the first planet discovered
after the Babylonians looked up.

https://in-the-sky.org/skymap.php