Word: cassini
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Saturn's Secrets NASA's Cassini probe, dancing and ducking, kicks off its visit with amazing images...
Other questions should be answered when Cassini flies by Hyperion, a tumbling moon that appears to have been knocked off its pins by a collision eons ago and has never regained its footing; and Tethys, a moon that bears such a massive impact scar that only the barest geological margin keeps it from shattering altogether...
...Cassini-Huygens is widely thought to be the last of NASA's great Cadillac probes--multibillion-dollar ships stuffed with instruments and complex backup systems. In the planning stage for 19 years, the craft cost $1.4 billion to design and build and nearly $2 billion to fly. When NASA adopted its "faster, better, cheaper" philosophy in the 1990s, it drove the cost of its unmanned ships down to the range of a couple of hundred million dollars--mostly by relying on off-the-shelf parts and eliminating redundant systems...
...moon-Mars initiative will cost at least $170 billion--and that's from an agency that has never met a cost estimate it couldn't overrun. Forget the fixation with getting bodies in orbit or boots in the soil, critics say, and you could fairly blanket other planets with Cassini-quality landers and orbiters and still have billions left over. NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe, not surprisingly, disagrees: "Robotic missions are precursor missions." The most thorough exploration, he says, "requires the unique cognitive skills that only human beings can bring to the equation...
...Cassini really does represent the end of an era, it's a glorious end. Space scientists can justly take pride in the ship they have built and launched. They ought to be humbled too by the enormousness of the frontier they are mapping. "We have always tended to underestimate the splendor that the solar system has to offer," says physicist Soderblum. Knowing that this may be the last time--at least in our lives--that we get such a good look at Saturn makes the wonder of what we're seeing all the sweeter. --Reported by Dan Cray/Pasadena with other...