The End of Cassini Mission

>see this vid
>weep out loud

You deserve it
F

F

youtu.be/KNmgiinYY-M

>99% of people have absolutely no idea what Cassini even is

and a few % of those again are convinced that space is filled with ether and illuminati lies

so long, space cowboy

I dont understand why they dont keep it in orbit for 100 years so we can go out and grab it and put it in a museum in the future

they're worried that it'll crash into a moon that could potentially harbor life and contaminate it with earth life. microbes and tardigrades are hardy little fuckers. they don't want to take any chances

because their budget runs out and they do NOT want to show politicians that probes don't actually need budgets to operate in deep space

Why can't they put it in an orbit that would decay in a couple hundred years and achieve the same thing if no one comes out and grabs it?

This sounds more likely, desu.

>tardigrades
retardigrades, lol
dont the probes run out of fuel to spin around?

>tfw randomly wrote a summary report on Cassini's exploration of the surface of Enceladus in 8th grade and my teacher kept bringing it up in class for the rest of the year
Was it autism?

Don't think they use fuel to turn/orient themselves

What do you think they use?

Well. Goodnight sweet prince

gyrocopes

Saturn's a difficult thing to orbit. The rings mean you either orbit a fair way out with the moons where your orbit will take ages to decay, or passing so close to the planet you're practically scraping the atmosphere anyway meaning your orbit will decay very quickly. Plus, there's so many bits of rock and such floating around Saturn that any close orbit would quickly be perturbed and the spacecraft could end up anywhere.

Besides, it's power source will run out pretty soon as well. Much better for it to get some final data to us about the upper atmosphere of Saturn, rather than having to wait for a later mission to get that data. If we want a souvenir when we get there we call always dig out the Huygens probe.

F

well ok maybe not for orientation, but how about for changing orbits?

F

F

F

One of the best NASA missions I think

Wow

Hexagonal areola. Now I've seen everything. Thanks internet/universe. I can finally die now.

Found the psychopath. Psychopaths are known to feel stmpathy for inanimate objects and animals before people.

Holy shit it's hexagonal... and it's gaseous... that's amazing

they do, in fact
not powerful enough

how the fuck does that work

Psychopaths are known to feel whatever traits psychologists associate with their enemies.

>superhero that has the survivability traits of a tardigrade/water bear
>known as "The Tard"

bamp

>Cassini ends
>40 replies

>What Is Your Style of Rationality?
>WOAH DUDE CHILL MASTER RACE
>+300

thats nice.

>not designing to land on titan as a climax of the mission
shit tier.
>muh microbes

Not necessarily, maybe he was just really impressed by your work.

The problem is that an orbit isn' stable. It always suffers from slight changes in gravity because of the Sun and Saturn, also Saturn has billions of moons. So when a big moon floats by it pulls the Cassini a bit to himself. resulting in a slight change in the orbit. after years it could be so that the orbit isn't stable at all and could crash in one of the moons nearby and there is a chance that there is life on that moon. If the Cassini hits that moon it could kill all life containing it and that would be a shame.

It could be worse..oh wait nope, theeere's the daily FE-thread

>If the Cassini hits that moon it could kill all life containing it and that would be a shame.
>passing up the opportunity to score Humanity's first xenokill

The first of many! Fuckn xenos!

When you put it that way...

That'll do, pig

>not designing to land on titan as a climax of the mission
Wot. Cassini DID send a lander down to Titan.

F

fuck, it looks so earth like

You're incorrect.

Man Cassini was fucking amazing. Aesthetically, too, the images it made were absolutely amazing. Unlike Juno for example which was pretty disappointing in that regard as of yet. I mean, even Hubble produces more appealing images and it's not even there.

man that's a great webm
Is that all of cassini's pics or just a few of them?

F

Moloch-worshippers probably jizzed themselves into a coma when viewing that.

I've heard that there's a few giant storms on the North Pole that influence the air currents to push clouds into a hexagonal shape. I might be wrong, so don't count on my answer, but this is what I've heard about it

>tfw tripping balls doing dabs while watching Cassini webm and listening to Skrillex

youtube.com/watch?v=WSeNSzJ2-Jw

Titan's the only other world in the Solar System with rivers and rain. It's a shame we know so little about it.

>This image, taken with the radar on the Cassini spacecraft, shows just how similar the features in Titan’s surface are to Earth’s landforms.
>Aside from Earth, Titan is the only other body where we have found evidence of active erosion on a large scale. There are seas, lakes and rivers filled with liquid hydrocarbons – mainly methane and some ethane – that etch the moon’s surface, in much the same way water erodes Earth’s.
>A striking example is Vid Flumina, the Nile-like, branching river system visible on the upper-left quadrant of the image. The river, in the moon’s north polar region, flows into Ligeia Mare, a methane-rich sea that appears as a dark patch on the right side of the image.
>Researchers in Italy and the US analysed Cassini radar observations from May 2013 and recently revealed that the narrow channels that branch off Vid Flumina are deep, steep-sided canyons filled with flowing hydrocarbons.
>The channels are a little less than a kilometre wide, up to 570 m deep and with slopes steeper than 40º. This suggests they have been sculpted by liquid methane, flowing into the main Vid Flumina river, that has persistently eroded the canyon walls – a geological process reminiscent of the carving of river gorges on our planet.
>The study is the first direct evidence of deeply entrenched, methane-flooded channels on Titan. Finding out how they formed provides insights into the moon’s origin and evolution and could help understand similar geological processes on Earth.
>The Cassini–Huygens radar team is hoping to observe the Ligeia Mare and Vid Flumina region again in April 2017, during Cassini’s final approach to Titan. The mission is a cooperation between NASA, ESA and Italy’s ASI space agency.

I cried a little bit at the end.

I actually teared up. This hasn't happened in a while.

F

>muh microbes
Let's just not decontaminating or do what ever it takes to start seeding life already.We could at least have something to watch