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STUPID To Crash Cassini Probe



 
 
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  #11  
Old October 22nd 17, 03:10 AM 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 Sat, 21 Oct 2017 14:00:58 -0700, Fred J. McCall
wrote:

Mr. B1ack wrote:

On Sat, 21 Oct 2017 12:25:38 -0400, SteveGG
wrote:

I couldn't agree more !

The contamination issue would be totally laughable, if it wasn't so
sad and ridiculous, but that's the official "reason".

What a waste. It could have been parked in a stable orbit and made
available for future science, historians, etc.


Hey, it's got some memory space onboard ... it could
be instructed to save up periodic observations so
every once in a while we could download the stash.
Doesn't hurt to have an eye way "out there" either in
case something interesting happens.


How much memory do you think it has on board? How do you think we
normally talk to it. It was already extended for NINE YEARS.


We could get some useful stuff form it NINTEEN years
from now. Why did we waste that opportunity ??? The
Voyagers seemed useless relics too ... until we got
all interested in the heliopause. Surprise, we had
usable spacecraft in the vicinity because nobody'd
bothered to crash them into anything.

The "contamination" thing is one of the worst excuses
I've ever heard. MIGHT, under some circumstances,
have some merit for Mars if we were worried about
mold spores or whatever, but Saturn ... nah. A nice
safe orbit was possible.


Not Saturn. The moons. Which we might decide to inhabit some day. In
some ways they're better than Mars. You can't just park it and forget
about it.


How long have those moons been there ? Yes, we could
have parked it and pretty much forgotten about it. And if
grey aliens kicked it into a moon, so what ? It's a flyspeck.
Those moons get bombarded with random galactic crap
all the time.

I think somebody said "Hey, let's CRASH it into
Saturn, that'd be like SO cool !" ... and there
went a taxpayer gigabuck.


I think you should let someone else do the thinking. That's a
preposterous notion.


Um ... not so much actually ......... socialize with
some tech-nerds for awhile and you'll see :-)

Hmm ... Pence is now nominally the top dog of the
US space effort so it might not hurt to complain to
him about this sort of thing. Policy CAN change.
Gigabuck probes should not be considered part
of a first-person-shooter game by JPL nerds. If
it still mostly works, KEEP it around.


Policy CAN change but this one wouldn't have. A number of studies
were done to figure out a 'safe' way to dispose of or park the thing.


It didn't need to be disposed of AT ALL.

  #12  
Old October 22nd 17, 09:12 AM posted to talk.politics.misc,sci.space.policy,alt.politics,alt.politics.trump,soc.culture.usa
Fred J. McCall[_3_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 10,018
Default STUPID To Crash Cassini Probe

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.
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.

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.

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?

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.

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



--
"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
  #13  
Old October 22nd 17, 09:19 AM posted to talk.politics.misc,sci.space.policy,alt.politics,alt.politics.trump,soc.culture.usa
Fred J. McCall[_3_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 10,018
Default STUPID To Crash Cassini Probe

Mr. B1ack wrote:

On Sat, 21 Oct 2017 14:00:58 -0700, Fred J. McCall
wrote:

Mr. B1ack wrote:

On Sat, 21 Oct 2017 12:25:38 -0400, SteveGG
wrote:

I couldn't agree more !

The contamination issue would be totally laughable, if it wasn't so
sad and ridiculous, but that's the official "reason".

What a waste. It could have been parked in a stable orbit and made
available for future science, historians, etc.

Hey, it's got some memory space onboard ... it could
be instructed to save up periodic observations so
every once in a while we could download the stash.
Doesn't hurt to have an eye way "out there" either in
case something interesting happens.


How much memory do you think it has on board? How do you think we
normally talk to it. It was already extended for NINE YEARS.


We could get some useful stuff form it NINTEEN years
from now. Why did we waste that opportunity ??? The
Voyagers seemed useless relics too ... until we got
all interested in the heliopause. Surprise, we had
usable spacecraft in the vicinity because nobody'd
bothered to crash them into anything.


Because it was done. It had no fuel. The team supporting it already
has more years of data to work with than they can handle. It was a
hazard to other things in the Saturn system. DSN is a scarce resource
and is needed for other things. I could go on. Voyager never went
inactive and was always intended to keep going out.

The "contamination" thing is one of the worst excuses
I've ever heard. MIGHT, under some circumstances,
have some merit for Mars if we were worried about
mold spores or whatever, but Saturn ... nah. A nice
safe orbit was possible.


Not Saturn. The moons. Which we might decide to inhabit some day. In
some ways they're better than Mars. You can't just park it and forget
about it.


How long have those moons been there ? Yes, we could
have parked it and pretty much forgotten about it. And if
grey aliens kicked it into a moon, so what ? It's a flyspeck.
Those moons get bombarded with random galactic crap
all the time.


Congratulations on demonstrating that you don't know **** about
orbital mechanics. No, you can't just 'park it and forget it'. And
if you could, it quickly goes out of communication and you can't get
it back again. And no, they don't get "bombarded with random galactic
crap all the time" and what little they do get is not from Earth.

I think somebody said "Hey, let's CRASH it into
Saturn, that'd be like SO cool !" ... and there
went a taxpayer gigabuck.


I think you should let someone else do the thinking. That's a
preposterous notion.


Um ... not so much actually ......... socialize with
some tech-nerds for awhile and you'll see :-)


Well, actually, I AM a rocket scientist. The people doing this work
are very different from your random semi-literate nerd friends.

Hmm ... Pence is now nominally the top dog of the
US space effort so it might not hurt to complain to
him about this sort of thing. Policy CAN change.
Gigabuck probes should not be considered part
of a first-person-shooter game by JPL nerds. If
it still mostly works, KEEP it around.


Policy CAN change but this one wouldn't have. A number of studies
were done to figure out a 'safe' way to dispose of or park the thing.


It didn't need to be disposed of AT ALL.


You're in denial of reality at this point.


--
"Some people get lost in thought because it's such unfamiliar
territory."
--G. Behn
  #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


  #15  
Old October 24th 17, 01:05 AM posted to talk.politics.misc,sci.space.policy,alt.politics,alt.politics.trump,soc.culture.usa
Greg \(Strider\) Moore
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 752
Default STUPID To Crash Cassini Probe

"Mr. B1ack" wrote in message
...

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 ???


You're actually looking at a classic case of Survival Bias. You only see
the items in a fairly stable orbit because all the others have already
decayed.

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


Actually there aren't. We haven't solved the 3-body problem, let alone the
dozen+ body problem.


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.


There actually was some science obtained from doing this.


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.


4 GB isn't bad, but it's not great. and the longer stuff stays in memory in
that environment, the more memory upset errors you will have.


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.


Are there any that can pick up a signal from that far away?

Also as pointed out, with the ability to point the craft, you're pretty much
SOL in terms of being able to retrieve your precious data from it.

At this point, you're probably far better off finding the money for a new
graft and launching on Falcon Heavy.

You'd have better instruments, more storage capacity, more mass you can
throw at it.


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


--
Greg D. Moore http://greenmountainsoftware.wordpress.com/
CEO QuiCR: Quick, Crowdsourced Responses. http://www.quicr.net
IT Disaster Response -
https://www.amazon.com/Disaster-Resp...dp/1484221834/

  #16  
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_]
external usenet poster
 
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
 




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