Subject: Cassini down.
Author:
Posted on: 2017-09-15 13:50:00 UTC
The ship has hit the atmosphere, and contact has been lost. The Deep Space Network (at the time of posting) tragically shows Canberra 43 and 35 standing open on the CAS channel - but nothing coming in.
So long, Cassini.
NASA have also released the compiled version of the last photo it took, several hours before impact.
hS
Today is a sad day. In about two hours, the NASA space probe Cassini will be plummetting into the atmosphere of Saturn. It will keep transmitting the data from its instruments for as long as its thrusters, operating at full power, can keep its antenna pointed at Earth.
But the force of its descent will be too strong. It will lose lock. It will tumble. And then it will be gone.
It won't be sending pictures back on its way down - they would take too long to transmit. But over the thirteen years of its mission around Saturn, it has sent back literally tens of thousands of beautiful images of the planet, its rings, its family of moons, and - on one memorable day in 2013 - every single human being who has ever lived.
This is a sad day. In fact, it's a sharding miserable day, particularly for those of us who used the probes maps of Titan on our Gathering there. There's no other probe like it - of the four other probes beyond the Belt, the Voyagers are just looking at the stars, New Horizons can only make flybys, and Juno is locked into a close orbit around Jupiter, and seems to be ignoring the moons. Cassini is unique, and in a very short while, it will be gone.
... which is why I wrote/compiled a small tribute to it and its years of work.
Goodnight, Cassini
hS
The ship has hit the atmosphere, and contact has been lost. The Deep Space Network (at the time of posting) tragically shows Canberra 43 and 35 standing open on the CAS channel - but nothing coming in.
So long, Cassini.
NASA have also released the compiled version of the last photo it took, several hours before impact.
hS
And now I'm imagining how it fell. Did it burn? Break apart? Simply get crushed by the gravity?
Mostly-wild guessing here, plus a lot of time playing KSP: Cassini broke apart early in atmospheric entry, probably not long after loss of signal. At that time, everything was still moving unbelievably quickly, and anything that was not destroyed by atmospheric forces would have been melted by the heat of reentry. (For example, the iridium-graphite fuel pellet containers.)
This analysis comes from a few things: First, as a deep-space probe, Cassini was not designed to deal with significant force on her frame. The worst she experienced was launch, which was while everything was bolted down and aligned in a single direction to survive it better. Secondly, entries into gas giants happen unbelievably quickly - multiple times faster than escape velocity here on Earth. So, forces would rapidly have piled up to unsurvivable amounts. And finally, as a vehicle not designed for reentry, Cassini would not have had anything resembling stable airflow around her hull- she would have tumbled in an ever-worsening tumble until failure occurred.
I'm afraid I don't have much good to report from my corner of the world, either.
Local news
This actually happened back on 9/11 and it freaked me out.
Officials say gas leak caused New Albany house explosion
It was close enough to my house that I actually felt the explosion. Scary stuff, but luckily nobody was home and nobody got hurt.
Local serious news
As my brother put it, "That moment when you realize you were taught sex ed by a sex offender." Yeah... we always knew something was off about my vice principal in middle school, but that's just... *shudders*
Serious news
Just when you thought we were done with hurricanes. Thankfully, these two are only tropical disturbances for now, but I really, really hope that they die down before they get any stronger.
More serious news
North Korea's fired off another missile, this time with the range to hit Guam.
I'm legit scared about this.
And that's all I'm going to say because this has been a bad week for news.
Have a smiling baby pig to make up for it.
