The Audi option
>Cassini is travelling at thousands of miles per hour so should blast though the ring with minimal time for a collision.
The faster you drive, the less time for a collision and so the safer you are!
The Cassini space probe has begun a series of orbits designed to swing it through the edges of Saturn's ring system. The probe, which has been orbiting the gas giant since 2004, fired a six-second burst of its rocket motor at 0409 PT (1209 UTC) to put it into a swooping orbit 57,000 miles (91,000 kilometers) over the gas giant …
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You say: "Oh, DEER!"
So far I have managed to 'swerve to avoid'. Stupid bucks jumping at you like it's a contest or something. One tried to race alongside of me after I swerved to avoid it. >60mph for a few seconds. I hadn't known they could sprint that fast. 'Prey animals' (vegetarian) just aren't that smart.
(yeah, has nothing to do with space probes like Cassini)
right before the video is lost, let's queue in some famous lines from Star Wars "the original"
"She's breaking up, she's breaking up!"
"You say Oh, DEER!"
That's the worst thing to call anybody.
Neptune has arcs instead of full rings.
Neptune has four full rings in addition to the arcs of the Adams ring.
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This outer ring isn't expected to give Cassini much of a problem, but the engine port has been covered just in case and its high-gain antenna is being used to shield as much of the instrumentation as possible
I'm glad I didn't have to make the choice between protecting the engine or the antenna!
As a guess here : small fleck of ice hits the parabolic dish used to focus signals to/from Cassini and makes a hole, say, a few centimeters across, and you just lose a bit of signal strength. The rest of the dish continues to work.
Make a hole that size elsewhere in Cassini, and you will not be going further into space today. Or at least, not with a fully functioning spacecraft.
Orbital speed for the F ring is about 16 km/s (rough mental calculation), or about twice that of objects in low-earth orbit. The speed of Cassini, relative to the ring particles, would be in roughly that ballpark (it's moving faster relative to Saturn, but in a different orbit plane and highly elliptical orbit). Double the speed means four times the kinetic energy.
As a guess here : small fleck of ice hits the parabolic dish used to focus signals to/from Cassini and makes a hole, say, a few centimeters across, and you just lose a bit of signal strength.
Yep. I worked on some materials issues for a portable military satellite radio that had an 2.5-meter parabolic dish (vs. Cassini's 4m dish). They put some ludicrously tight restrictions on what I could change for fear of weakening the signal, but the original design spec required tolerance of an entire petal (1 of 6) of the collapsible dish being shot away, which was a common event on the hilltops of Afghanistan. The radio also frequently oscillated several feet in a modest breeze and maintained its link.
Of course, talking to LEO commsats with a 2-kilowatt budget is a bit different than trying to listen to Earth with a few tens of watts. But a few holes in a 4-meter dish shouldn't deeply impact signal strength.
The point of the fiery destruction is that the probe doesn't crash in to and contaminate one of the major moons. But with all this diving in and out of the rings with a non trivial chance of collision, are the boffins sure that a debris cloud couldn't form that could eventually reach the moons?
Isn't the artwork for that Mega-Saturn exo-planet?
This seems quite counterproductive.
Point taken, but it's running out of gas. The remaining options were "go into uninformative, long distance stable orbits that won't run the risk of contaminating collisions," or (ahem) "banzai! banzai! banzai!"
I'm a bit dubious of the contamination risk. Frankly, any germ on Cassini that has survived until now and might survive an impact on Titan or Enceladus is a superior lifeform that deserves the chance to thrive. (May it rule us benevolently.)