NASA's ageing black hole-stalking probe switched off Astronomers are marking the decommissioning of a satellite that has spent 16 years peering into black holes and neutron stars. NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) helped astronomers establish the existence of highly magnetised neutron stars and collected the first evidence of the spacetime-distorting frame-dragging …
Public letter:
Dear Friends.
No too big secret that NASA has gotten toughest question to fund future & current projects. I’d like to offer you game-changing strategy: One & First among the Key Factors is to become financially independent, space tourism has really great potential to be first having extra incomes, but common mistake of start-ups like SpaceX is the way to excite customers. Ticket to Space is too expensive even for far not poor personas, but fortunately this obstacle can be broken through with lottery schemes to sell tickets + that way makes possible to get many times more income to advance than Just to search wealthy ones.
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+ one wonderful & useful moment must be mentioned: the more NASA will be self-funded, the more money from government will be given to NASA.
... if a science bird is still functional, stable and otherwise operational but no longer of use to the mainstream science establishment due to dwindling funds or what-have-you. Why not take a leaf out of the Open Source movement and turn over the control of the satellite to a volunteer body established to keep squeezing every ounce of useful data out of the thing, even though it operates with no budget, there are people out there (HAMs, etc) who have the equipment to communicate with the satellite, they are tasked to send commands and receive the science data, who pass it on to a boinc-like project to crunch the numbers using donated CPU cycles and send the results to the Boffins who are still researching the stuff the satellite is studying.
I suppose that way they can milk every last byte of data they possibly can from the millions or billions spent getting the thing built and up there.
*Tux: Natch
It would be obvious that the commands to cause the satellite to adjust it's orbit wouldn't be given over to the public, and the people who would most likely take up the job of command and control of the satellite would be vetted by the relevant govt authorities to make sure they aren't just in it for the lulz, so to speak.
«Re-enter[ing] the Earth's atmosphere and burn[ing] up» seems an all too low-key finalé for a satellite which has performed such service - the least one could ask is that it be sent to a better universe via a black hole (yes, I know that what is currently believed to be the nearest black hole, V4641 Sagitarii lies about 24K light years away, but noblesse oblige)....
Henri
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I take it we're all invited then! Venue details required..
When it will re-enter depends on how much atmospheric drag it is subjected to, which depends on whether the Earth's atmosphere is expanded or contracted, which in turn depends on how stroppy the Sun is being. NASA can't guess the latter, hence who the re-entry date has such a wide range.
