I'm headed to Boca Raton. We don't have internet connectivity there yet (and as of the last few hours, we don't even have a land line), so I don't know when I'll be logging on again, but hopefully by early in the week.

Until then, congratulations to the Cassini team. Sometimes, amidst all of the ongoing disaster of our space policy (for instance, check out this bit of micromanagement foolishness by Congress), it's easy to get jaded, but if someone had told you thirty-five years ago (the first moon landing) that there would be a satellite in orbit around Saturn sending back such spectacular close-up pictures of its rings and its many moons (most of which we were unaware at that time), you would have been amazed, even in the face of the manned moon landings. This is one of those moments (which are happening ever more frequently) in which I finally feel like I'm living in the twenty-first century.

Keith has the first surface pictures of Titan up over at SpaceRef.

The URL

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=13283

Mr. Simberg wrote:
"but if someone had told you thirty-five years ago (the first moon landing) that there would be a satellite in orbit around Saturn sending back such spectacular close-up pictures of its rings and its many moons (most of which we were unaware at that time), you would have been amazed, even in the face of the manned moon landings."

If somebody had told me this 35-years ago, I would have drooled on them, being only one-year-old at the time.

However, I would also note that the 1968 movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" showed people a nuclear-powered spacecraft orbiting Jupiter. And it had people on it. I know that movie was not supposed to be predictive, but I wish we were living in that universe instead of our own.

35 years ago as a 3 year old, I walked outside and looked up at the moon and my dad told me there were now people there.

How I now long to be able to do again what I could do as a three year old.

Yea I have definently been waiting for this moment as well. Very cool, very exciting, Saturn is by far my favorite planet. I get my dob out and stare at it every chance I get. Not only cause the rings are so interesting by also because its a little harder to find its moons compared to Jupiter. I only have a 6-inch scope in city light conditions Titan is the only Saturian sattelite I can make out. When imposed over a backdrop of stars its become more interesting making out which one is the closer object. Jupiters moons line up across a relatively even plane and are much easier to find grouped together.

I enjoy the press coverage the event is getting as well. It seems that people are really interested in this. Only thing I hate is when they always drop the 2.2 billion dollar price tag around the whole story every chance they get. Then, they always fail to mention that we didn't pay all that money that other ESA agencies helped us out as well.

This feels like the 21st Century all right... I've been interested in astronomy all my life, and I'm now 52. Calling me even an amateur astronomer would be stretching the definition, but maybe interested layman would be about right. I remember seeing astronomy books when I was about ten in which photos of the nearer planets were barely more than blurry black and white blobs, and the outer planets were more starlike than anything else. As for the moons, forget it.

Now, in the last few years, we've had, in no particular order, Mars's closest approach in 60,000 years, rovers landing on Mars, Galileo's tour of Jupiter, the discovery of two sizable objects beyond Pluto, the first transit of Venus since 1882, Cassini's orbit of Saturn, and exo-planets up the wazoo, to say nothing of the regular dose of new wonders from Hubble. The two major astronomy magazines must be going nuts keeping up with it all.

Lord knows it would be lots better if we had, say a real live geologist tapping rocks on Mars with a hammer instead of something that looks like one of those RC toys kids play with in parking lots, but even at a bare minimum, the marvels are pouring in. These are exciting times to be living in just for that much.

--Dwight

Hefty wrote:
"Only thing I hate is when they always drop the 2.2 billion dollar price tag around the whole story every chance they get. Then, they always fail to mention that we didn't pay all that money that other ESA agencies helped us out as well."

Space News had these rough estimates:

Total Cassini budget--$3.27 billion
European participation--$600 million

The latter figure includes Huygens and the Italian Space Agency's $160 million high gain antenna for Cassini. The Europeans claim that once you include the salaries of their scientist teams, their contribution runs to 25% of the total.

The Cassini scientists actually had some interesting things to say about this the other night at a press conference. They said that for some missions it is simply impossible to do it cheap. This is both because of the technical challenge and because the opportunities are rare, so you have to build a bigger, more capable satellite.

This makes sense. First, things like RTGs are not cheap (I believe that they cost something like $33 million apiece for the three on Cassini). And Saturn is not easy to get to, like Mars. You get a Mars launch window every two years and you can fly there in nine months. So you can do faster cheaper better. That's just not possible with Saturn. One of the guys had a good quote that was something along the lines of "You don't want to travel all that way and learn that you asked the wrong question." In other words, you don't get a chance to do a follow-up mission in a few years. These are once a decade or once a generation missions.

Probably shouldn't bring this up, but....

You DO realize that the "Face-On-Mars" crowd is going to go ga-ga over this blow up:
>http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=13283

Right?

After all. It shows an image of an "obviously" un-natural circluar shaped object in the lower right hand corner, that MUST be an alien artifact....

:::duck and cover::::

Randy
(Congrats! Cassini!