What is Saturn's policy on recycling?
Do we get some money back for scrap?
NASA has revealed its final plans to crash the Cassini probe into Saturn next year. Cassini–Huygens, to give the craft its full name, launched in 1997 and skipped past Venus twice and Earth once for some gravity-assisted acceleration action. It then grazed Asteroid 2685 Masursky, used Jupiter for acceleration and arrived at at …
Similar the the UKs, they get you to spend hours washing and sorting it, to be free of contaminants (with vast amounts of processed chlorinated drinkable water) only to then burn it behind your back.
So the public think it gets 'recycled' into {something}, but really just allows no one to have issue with large multinational supermarkets, packaging everything 'ever so pretty', in plastic packaging that lasts a thousand years, for something eaten that day.
If Supermarkets were made to remain responsible for their packaging after use, even once in the hands of the consumer, they'd be the biggest polluters in the UK.
What a shame it's coming to an end. What an absolutely blinding bit of building and boffinry.
That thing has been up there so long it become a bit of space furniture and it's sad to see these long duration missions end.
Hopefully with efficient things like ion drives being usable now we might see missions that can last even longer.
I quite like the idea that in a few hundred thousand years or so, long after Humanity has [gone extinct / spread to distant suns / lost it's civilisation and climbed back up] someone else will one day drop a lander on a tiny rock and discover the remains of Rosetta and Philae, and by our works know us.
We should definitely transmit a memory-filling pattern of 'Frist!' to Rosetta before lithobraking, however.
"by our works know us" but only if the prevailing "time-line story" permits.
Oh that metallic looking thing? no that's just a bit of crystal that has formed over time, purely coincidental, no we are the only intelligent life that has ever been on earth.
(note to the clean up team have we finished Phrygia yet?)
But recall the last three sad lines of that poem:
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
We might prefer the slightly more up-beat ending of Horace Smith's version:
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
"From that position Cassini will be able to visit Saturn's “F rings” “kinked and braided”. Cassini's not had a good look at the F rings since 2004 and then only managed to see one side. This time around – or times, because the mission plans 20 orbits – the craft will get a very good look at the rings from a distance of just 7,800 kilometers."
Ah, the braided rings: perhaps THIS time a probe will send back a decent photo of 'Message Bearer' ... ;-)
Not enough fuel left, alas, to fling it anywhere else in the solar system: it's a permanent captive of Saturn. (Indeed, if you remember how it arrived in the Saturnian system, with a huge orbital injection burn, it would need a huge amount of fuel to reach escape velocity. And then, to roam forever (a la Voyager or New Horizon), it has to reach SOLAR escape velocity...)
Amazing achievement, though, this mission.
Not enough fuel left, alas, to fling it anywhere else in the solar system
Up through about 2013-2014, Cassini had enough fuel that - with a Titanian gravity assist - it could reach Uranus. However, it'd be a very slow transit, something like 20 years. The cost of maintaining the Cassini team and the chances for hardware failure were too high to make the option viable.
Wow -- thanks for that info: I hadn't realised that it would be possible! Extraordinary to think that it could have done that, and that they considered the option... (Understandable why they didn't do it in the end, though.)
Out of interest: where did you get that bit of information? It's always interesting to find background documentation on the engineering aspects of these missions -- some of the NASA history documents on probes like Surveyor, Mariners and Pioneers make for fascinating reading, and they certainly make you respect the planners and engineers involved.
Peter
Out of interest: where did you get that bit of information?
The font of all knowledge, of course. ;) There's a full table of end-of-mission options for Cassini. I was incorrect about the 2014 date; the presented options date to 2008. I don't know when visits to other gas giants became non-viable due to fuel reserves.
Cloud traffic alert to all Saturnians: An alien-made object is expected to strike cloud top during the ides of September next year in the equatorial region; the precise impact location will be distributed later. Check back frequently for updates. The area concerned will be closed to all cloud traffic until the hazard is over.
We may look back from the future at the incredible images which Cassini (and let's not forget the Huygens lander on Titan), has faithfully sent back to us, and say, (a bit like with Apollo XI), "I remember seeing these for the first time" ...
I can't think of a single image from this mission which didn't amaze me with beauty and razor-sharp clarity, even if sometimes it took a few minutes to work out the PoV, identify shadows and structures as apparently improbable as any Escher print.
When I was a spotty teenager, I used to spend hours watching Saturn swimming* across the eye-piece of the school's telescope, trying to faithfully sketch what I could see, for the benefit of the Saturn dept. of the BAA and I counted moons, (I still remember some of their, almost magical, names).
But I never thought I would spend at least as much time again, gazing in spellbound wonder at the whole system up so-close, as I could have never visualised how complex it all was !
Cassini & team, I salute you - you've taken our eyes to places we never could have imagined and who knows, maybe the best images are yet to come in this last year.
* or as if painted on the bottom of a swimming pool, due to the effects of /our/ atmosphere.