I’ve read all your comments. I feel you are being difficult on purpose now just because you have this feeling that dumping a insignificant amount of plutonium (comparatively) into Saturn was bad.
I am just trying to see if you can think of any plausible way that we could have gotten all the data we did (greater distance would not have done it) without needing to ditch into Saturn AND make sure Cassini never touches any other moon.
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Guys, staaaaaaahp. @mindfu, don’t answer them any more, you’re repeating yourself.
Hey, how about that Huygens lander Cassini dropped off, uh-huh?
This is a serious debate, that is ongoing, but the mainstream belief based on available data is that Saturn has a small rocky core. Right now that belief is being challenged because of the new data from Cassini, particularly the magnetic field data, but the jury’s still out.
It’s unlikely NASA will get to Neptune before 2020, assuming our species even survives that long. But we did send New Horizons to Pluto. I have a tie tack and a messenger bag from that one!
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To get to Neptune by 2020 the vehicle would have to be on its way now.
Good point, I’ll try to clarify. I am not a great writer.
It’s highly unlikely NASA will get around to launching a Neptune mission before 2020. There are no currently approved missions although I believe several have been proposed. I do not believe any other space agencies are working on Neptune mission projects at this time, but I could be wrong.
If I was going to bet on how soon we’ll get to Neptune, I’d go long. Very long… as in possibly never. But I’d be glad to be proven incorrect!
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Be realistic - we’re not going to waste effort on a hopeless mission.
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Horizons was great, but it was an express to Pluto with no way to slow down to enter orbit. We need a probe to Pluto to spend a few years there, drop a lander, similar routine to Saturn. Same for the other two.
Remember - we’re going to do it, not because its easy, but because its haaaahhhd.
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But homeopathy!
I finished that bottle of tequila
No way. For starters, wrong Pu isotope.
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Could someone explain the thinking of deep sixing Cassini into Saturn to “avoid” future “contamination” of Titan or another moon, when it sent a probe into Titan a while back?
Perspiring minds want to know.
Well, I am a laymen and even so said Hoagland was a great indicator of something wrong somewhere in the argument…
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Consider it payback for that time the Saturnians sent that space probe to crash in Tunguska.
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NASA has an obligation under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty to avoid contaminating celestial bodies as best it can. The Huygens probe was specifically intended to be delivered to Titan, and would have been sterilized according to an extremely rigorous “Planetary Protection” protocol. It’s still not a 100% guarantee that we wouldn’t contaminate the landing site, but the risk was mitigated as much as possible. (Incidentally, mission controllers were also more concerned about Cassini running into Enceladus than Titan, because Enceladus has liquid water on it while Titan does not, and that’s a major factor in the calculation of whether a location could develop and support life “as we know it”.)
Because it was never intended to land anywhere, Cassini didn’t have to be sterilized to the same standard. While it may seem unlikely for anything carried on the craft to have survived 20 years in the vacuum of space, we don’t have any way to guarantee that. Cassini essentially represented an unmitigated risk of biological contamination, so mission controllers opted to dispose of the craft in the safest way they could. On top of the risk of biological contamination, the uncontrolled destruction of the craft’s plutonium-based RTG power source in a collision with one of Saturn’s moons is an additional risk to any potential life out there, so again, disposal in Saturn was the statistically safer option.
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My sources tell me that NASA has revised and tightened the protocols recently.
Jokes aside, NASA was looking for a new Planetary Protection Officer recently. Is that a cool job title or what…
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You’re right; almost all procurement programmes neglect or hand-wave the disposal phase.
That’s a design choice, not an immutable law of physics.
Yes, but it’s also normal to strip those ships of all contaminants before they’re scuttled.
The dose makes the poison.
It surely WAS one, though the argument made was they could have just steered it away. As design choices go, how much more expensive do you think it would be to have it accomplish it’s mission goals and then escape Saturns gravity?
I’m thinking double the cost. Maybe triple.
The receptor makes the dose the poison. No receptor → no toxin.
They could have just steered it away, if that had been the choice. Instead NASA was allowed to go with the cheap and easy solution, because dumping 70# plutonium onto a pristine alien planet? Eh. Who gives a fuck.
I recall that you’re not one of the taxpayers on the hook for this Science?
Yes, I like to tell other people how to spend their money, too.
