A couple decades ago, my mother went out (probably not to Florida) to protest the launch of a space probe. She lives downstream from the impending Hanford accident[sup]*[/sup] and has a deep, abiding aversion to nuclear power and especially to the plutonium that was going up into orbit with it, destined to make two slingshot passes of Earth on its billion+ mile journey. I made no comment at the time.
We saw the pictures, some of us have perused or pored over the data and many of us have been appropriately awed (me: just odd anyway). It has been an impressive tour of one of the most interesting spots in the neighborhood.
The final dive is less than half a day away. Thank you to Cassini, NASA and ESA.
*The Hanford Reservation is a fucking nightmare, apparently run by buffoons, slackers and Larry Fine: if there is not a catastrophe, or at least a major leak of waste soon, it will be a miracle.
WITH the plutonium pretty much depleted, right? Still, the Saturnians won’t like the pollution. I love how we “made sure” it hits the gas giant instead of a moon. Can’t be too careful.
ETA, since I’m not sure it was intentional. Titan gave the bump and so on.
I think the RTG plutonium is probably still quite hot, since there do not appear to be notable power conservation measures in place like with the Voyagers. It is the nitrogen tetroxide/hydrazine rocket fuel for maneuvering that is running out. They will use it up braking for entry.
And it’s not just good-bye for Cassini. It’s good-bye to the exploration of Saturn for the indefinite future, other than thru telescopes. So far as I can tell, there are no more planned probes to Saturn (other than wishful thinking). Somewhat bittersweet.
Today, I got my daily email from the Washington Post. For some reason, what was visible in my email overview was one headline and an excerpt from another article.
It read “Cassini crashes into Saturn” “I heard a scream and then there was smoke”.
[QUOTE=Earl Snake-Hips Tucker]
And it’s not just good-bye for Cassini. It’s good-bye to the exploration of Saturn for the indefinite future, other than thru telescopes. So far as I can tell, there are no more planned probes to Saturn (other than wishful thinking). Somewhat bittersweet.
[/QUOTE]
From what I can tell, it is not actually clouds all the way down. There is believed to be perhaps two thousand miles of gaseous atmosphere below the limb (visible) surface that transitions to a superfluid and eventually forms a sort of fog-shrouded sea. The ocean is theorized to be something like 8000 miles deep, where it probably becomes metallic (semisolid) hydrogen percolating helium rain. The actual cloud layers may be a couple hundred miles deep, but I believe there is a fair distance of cloudless sky between the cloudbase and the seafog.
A (very) small piece of me was on that mission. I worked decades ago for a defense contractor that, among other things, built space-borne computers. Cassini Huygens asked us to build a one-off for the craft. Never did find what its purpose was; not our department, all we did was the hardware and the language (think BAL if you’re old-timey nerd enough) to run it.
Anyway, an engineer and I spent about three weeks of our lives going over the CAD-designed CPU board layout checking for mistakes and optimizing the traces – CAD was still in its infancy then and the trace-routing algorithms were sub-par. One of us would have the schematic in front of us and the other the sheaf of trace sheets (one for each layer) and compare the two. We’d switch off every hour or two to keep from going blind. The guy at the schem would call out something like, I-6, pin two (I for IC) and the guy at the sheets would trace everywhere it went (I-7, pin 8; I-10, pin 2; C-25, positive leg, etc.), and the schem would have its connections ticked off.
An awful lot of cool stuff is the result of an even greater amount of scut work
Well, thanks for all the scut work. Y’all apparently did a real good job!
(“After a year long inquiry, a NASA mishap investigation commission has determined that the $3 billion Cassini-Huygens probe failed just hours before going into orbit around Saturn–after spending nearly seven years making its way to the ringed planet–because a circuit board was improperly wired…”)
I love how we “made sure” it hits the gas giant instead of a moon. Can’t be too careful.
I thought that’s what it would be too.