For you Lost in Space fans...
The Cassinin was launched one day before the fictional launch of the Jupiter 2.
It is great to see that Cassini is still collecting data.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft celebrated a very lonely 15th birthday on Monday from its orbit near the planet Saturn, roughly one billion miles from Earth. Cassini was originally launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on October 15, 1997. Since then, it has logged more than 3.8 billion miles in a tour around the …
>They wouldn't sell very many new ones if they never broke down.
If I hear this B.S. once again I swear I'm gonna barf.
The alternative to the "never gonna break" car is "infinite warranty". Are your ready to drive a car built like a Humvee but that costs enough to cover the "infinite warranty"? Yeah right.
The life of a craft seems somewhat bittersweet...
It seems on the one hand sad that such a successful venture will eventually be exterminated, with nothing physical left behind to show future generations.
But on the other hand the information gathered when it performs its last transmissions will be valuable stepping stones for the same future generations - even if they don't realise what was built and sacrificedin order to gather the information.
Those who worked on the craft must have a similar feeling - of knowing that something they've put so much blood sweat and tears into will never hang on a wall, or be handed down - but it will provide invaluable information for all of human kind (even if it's value isn't fully realised yet).
Beer is for Cassini - because it contains gas, just like Saturn (it's a poor excuse, but it'll do!)
> It seems on the one hand sad that such a successful venture will eventually be exterminated, with nothing physical left behind to show future generations.
Carl Sagan talked about what might happen if the Voyager spacecraft make it through the Oort cloud and out into interstellar space; there is nothing out there so there is nothing to degrade the ships.
This raises the possibility that the Voyagers will still be out there long after the sun and the earth are gone....
Divide the total cost of the Cassini project into the number of bytes transmitted back to earth (or both ways if you wish to be precise) then compare NASA's cost per byte from Saturn to Earth with that your telco charges you to transmit a byte across the room by SMS.
Now work out by how many orders of magnitude your telco is ripping you off every time you use SMS!
If you still don't believe such a magnitude warrants a complaint then factor in the differences in distance between a byte that's traveled from Saturn to that traversed by a typical SBS message.