I got the idea that NASA was basing the success of this mission on the as-yet undeveloped technology, and that the costs of that were becoming more clearly evident that they would be astronomical, thus canning the project. Is there more??? After all, didn’t the Voyager spacecrafts cross the orbit of Pluto som years ago, and that technology is crude by today’s standards.
My impression is that the problem is simply a lack of money, not a specific technological problem. After the failure of the two Mars probes, NASA realized they went a bit too far with the “faster, better, cheaper” motto and cut corners too much.
Well, it looks like the project hasn’t been completely scrapped. It just needs to be rethought a bit. I think that one of the goals of the mission is to have it maybe go into a pluto orbit to map the planet completly, rather than to just simply do a flyby. That, and the fact they probably want to accomplish this faster than the Voyager probes did make the project a bit more costly.
Look at Voyager 1 for instance. It cost less than 900 million dollars to get it to Neptune, and yet the amount of data received from it is so vastly more than they could have hoped for.
Were it not for the fdact that there are certain “consumables” onboard the Voyagers, we could talk to them for another coule of centries.
Now compare how much a typical mission costs these days. The Voyager probes, while complex devices, were pretty simple compared to today’s devices, so that tends to keep the return on investment vsw. cost factors pretty high…
By the way, loved the way you used the word “astronomical” to describe the costs. Beauty!
I don’t think that the P-K Express has ever gotten past the vague planning stages, for the technology reasons mentioned. Both Voyagers and Pioneers 10 and 11 have gone out farther than Pluto’s orbit, but nothing man-made has ever gone anywhere near Pluto. I think that the main reason for the mission would just be for the sake of completeness: We’ve sent probes to the other eight planets, and even “landed” (or at least, made contact with) on the inner ones (out to Jupiter, and I think that Cassini has an atmosphere probe for Saturn, too). It seems like we really ought to at least go have a look at all of them.
As to “faster, cheaper, better”, choose any two of the three.
It has a probe for Saturn’s biggest moon Titan. The probe is called Huygens and will be there in Nov 2004. I’m psyched.
http://spacelink.msfc.nasa.gov/NASA.Projects/Space.Science/Solar.System/Cassini.Mission.to.Saturn/.index.html
Here’s the Planetary Society’s latest news on trying to save the Pluto mission…
http://www.planetary.org/html/news/articlearchive/headlines/2000/saveplutoupdate.html
hmm…having trouble with this link…it’s that pesky space in the word “Satu rn” toward the end of the link which I can’t seem to fix. Anyway, if you clink on the link and then fix it in the address line of your browser, then you can get to NASA’s Cassini site.
http://spacelink.msfc.nasa.gov/NASA.Projects/Space.Science/Solar.System/Cassini.Mission.to.Saturn/.index.html
I hate to quench your excitement, but there is a problem with the Cassini/Huygens mission. It seems the engineers that designed the radio forgot to allow for the fact that the two would be travelling at different speeds during the Huygens descent into Titan’s atmosphere. Enough difference that the doppler shift will change the frequency of the radio waves so much that the receiver on Cassini won’t be able to hear it. The last I heard, they may lose up to two-thirds of the data from the probe.
A little more dosis of useless–yet interesting–knowledge: Huygens discovered Titan, hence the name of the probe dedicated to explore it.
As for chosing the name Cassini for the mission, it honors the italian astronomer who discovered what has been termed Cassini’s division, a divide that, IIRC, separates the inner section of Saturn’s rings from its outermost prolongations. Broadly speaking, he discovered that the rings were not a continuous band of debris equatorially embracing the planet, instead they are conformed by individual annular “layers” which together form the structure that we simple-minded earthlings call rings. A clarification–or a more detailed explanation–regarding this is not only expected but appreciated, since my recollection is pretty vague and as such, probably not entirely accurate.
The gaps in the rings correspond to harmonics with the orbital periods of the major sattelites (I believe the Cassini division is from Titan). Basically, if you put a particle into the Division, then it’s going to get a gravitational tug from Titan at the same point in every orbit, which will cause the orbit to decay after only a few times around.
I checked about Cassini’s division and it does refer to Saturn’s system of rings, not Titan’s. Its annular system is subdivided into three main rings, A, B and C. Cassini’s division indicates the space existing between the A and B rings, the outermost of the main rings. There are other, more tenuous layers of rings, such as the F ring, located farther outside. I found no mention of any existing names for the divides that separate the other rings.
I assume that obeys to the historical circumstances of the discovery of the rings: Galileo first observed them but didn’t understand what they were, Huygens explained their nature and Cassini found out that they didn’t form a continuos band of debris stretching away from the planet’s gravitational domains. When knowledge about their structure was refined, scientists adhered to the existing nomenclature that referred to Cassini’s division as the divide between the main rings and didn’t bother to name the divisions between the other annular layers. Or maybe they did…but I did not find any information regarding that hypothetical event.
No, no, Titan itself doesn’t have any rings, but it influences the pattern of Saturn’s rings. Specifically, I’m pretty sure that it’s responsible for the Cassini division. The other divisions are caused by Saturn’s other moons, but since they’re not as large as Titan, the divisions they produce aren’t as significant.