Sorry - whose planet is it again?
Whose budget was the question, and how much other science are you willing to give up for the perfection of your pure ideal science? The answer was -not your tax dollars-.
You can complain, feel free, but you didn’t pay for it. It’s free ice cream to you.
And Saturn is nobody’s planet. Neither is this one.
Wow. Entitled, much?
I can absolutely guarantee you that there’s already way more than 70 pounds of plutonium on Saturn. Are you equally offended by the plutonium-based RTG power supply used by the Curiosity rover on Mars? That rover can’t use solar panels to power all of its equipment - given its surface area, there just isn’t enough solar energy hitting Mars to provide enough power. Are you angry that the sky crane crashed into Mars after delivering the rover, rather than flinging itself all the way back out of Mars’s gravity well? What’s your opinion on the Apollo missions?
Exploration has and always will have an impact on the places we explore. The impacts we make are always going to be trade-offs between what we hope to accomplish, how effectively we can avoid causing problems, and how much money is available. NASA isn’t interested in using the solar system as a garbage dump, and believe me, they’re not just throwing Cassini into Saturn for shits and giggles. They’ve done a thorough cost/benefit analysis, and this was the safest and most effective way of dealing with Cassini while getting as much scientific data as possible out of it, without ballooning the mission’s cost by equipping it with far more fuel than it needed in order to throw it out of the solar system entirely (the only way to guarantee it never runs into a planet accidentally in the future), or risking a future impact with a far more scientifically sensitive location like Enceladus by trying to park it somewhere around Saturn.
There was no choice between sending a probe to Saturn with or without enough fuel to achieve escape velocity at the end of its mission. The choice was between sending Cassini to Saturn in the configuration it had, or not sending it at all. As it was, Cassini had to be scaled down from its original Mariner Mk.2 platform, and it still needed a bail-out from the ESA, who contributed the Huygens probe. Dropping 70 pounds of plutonium into Saturn is the functional equivalent of putting a drop of mercury into a hurricane. The only way for it to actually be dangerous to Saturn is if homeopathy works.
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It’s a sacrificial offering to the gods of physics.
Yeesh. Keep in mind humans have dropped spacecraft reactors onto Earth.
Remember the Kosmos series? There’s twenty or thirty more of them up there, that will come down in a couple thousand years if all goes well. It’s not unlikely that some of them could get knocked about and end up like Kosmos 1900 or 954, and apparently several of them are leaking already.
That’s a spurious argument. There is way more than 70# of plutonium on earth, but that was slight consolation to the residents of Nagasaki when they suddenly found themselves in possession of just 14#. Also, naturally occurring plutonium on Earth is bound up in the earth, not floating free in the atmosphere. The worst case risk assessment of the Cassini slingshot around Earth in 1999 is instructive in this regard; in the event that the slingshot had gone wrong, approx. the entire human population would have been exposed. The good news is that the isotope has a half life of less than a century.
Yes; I realise Cassini != Fat Man
Yes; I get the scale of Saturn c.f. Earth
Yes; I get that - given all the other design decisions - dumping Cassini into Saturn is safer than leaving it doing donuts in orbit
Yes; I smiled at the homeopathy analogy
P.s., we know with great certainty that NASA’s risk assessments can be tragically wrong headed at times.
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