Word: cassini
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...programs was as underwhelming as sampling those vast breakfast buffets in Vegas hotels. The techno, reggae and hip-hop music programs were fun to listen to, but the video seemed redundant: eyeballing a deejay is dull stuff. A space show, Cosmic Visions, had a good documentary about the Cassini mission to the outer planets, but it hardly seemed original. And the chat rooms on the site were almost always desolate...
Closing in at 42,500 m.p.h., one of the largest and most complex spacecraft ever built will pass only 725 miles from Earth Tuesday on its way to a 2004 rendezvous with Saturn, its spectacular rings and its giant moon, Titan. The ship is Cassini, and while it's an object of pride for space scientists, it's an object of fear for antinuclear activists. Weighing in at around six tons at its launch in October 1997, Cassini lacked the rocket power to fly directly out to Saturn, which is on average 800 million miles from Earth. Instead it headed...
...Tuesday's approach that frightens the activists. Should Cassini pass too close to Earth and burn up in the atmosphere, they warn, radioactive plutonium in the generators that provide the craft's electricity could cause millions of cancer deaths. Most scientists and doctors scoff at such claims. Any plutonium vaporized in an accident, they explain, would be so diluted in the atmosphere that it would pose no real threat to most people. Still, activists say, had Cassini been equipped with solar panels for electricity, all danger could have been averted. But Saturn receives only a hundredth of the sunlight Earth...
...week's end, controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported that Cassini, having already flown more than a billion miles, was in excellent shape. All systems were operating well, and the craft was on course for a flyby of home...
...Saturn receives only a hundredth of the sunlight Earth does, and solar panels needed to supply Cassini at that distance would have to be far too large for such a mission. Other than plutonium generators, says physicist James Van Allen, discoverer of Earth's radiation belts, "there is no practical source of electrical power for spacecraft that go to the outer planets...