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Old October 24th 17, 06:28 AM posted to talk.politics.misc,sci.space.policy,alt.politics,alt.politics.trump,soc.culture.usa
Fred J. McCall[_3_]
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Posts: 10,018
Default STUPID To Crash Cassini Probe

Mr. B1ack wrote:

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
m...

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 ???


Gee ... so a lot of them have over the past million years or so. The
stable ones are the only ones left. Unfortunately, you can't find a
'new' stable orbit.


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


Of course there are. Now all you need to do is find one that doesn't
already have something in it. Putting the thing around a large moon
is exactly what you DO NOT want to do, since it is having it crash
into a large moon and contaminate it that was the concern.


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.


I think you're a moron.

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.


How many terabytes in a 'gob'? Cassini had around 60 pounds of fuel
left at end of mission. The problem is that you CAN'T do any of the
things you say because you can't point the instruments, you can't find
the Earth, and you can't point the antenna.


So the 'expense' aspect is a false flag.


Your underpants are 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.


Why, when it costs them other data and they already have enough to
close out their careers. DSN is a finite resource.

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.


'Dish time'? Do you have any clue what it takes to talk to something
as far away as Saturn? Your 'touching' is going to cost millions of
dollars per year. I hope your amateurs are well heeled.


A few schools have their own dishes.


But nothing that can talk to something out by Saturn. NASA only has
three dishes that are large enough.

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 you lost the battle.


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


But you're a 'know nothing' and they're the experts. Even someone
moderately informed can figure it out. No fuel. Down to three
quarters of electrical power. Low bit rate requiring long contact
times on very expensive equipment. Required contact times are even
longer because Cassini can no longer point either its instruments or
its antenna. We don't want it hitting a moon, some of which are
actually candidates for native life, but there's no way to guarantee
that it won't without doing something drastic with it.


--
"Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the
truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong."
-- Thomas Jefferson