Triana Mothballed 201
jessemckinney writes "Apparently, the US congress of last year cut the funding of this great satellite project after it was finished. It will now take millions of dollars (us) to refuel and recalibrate the instruments. Why do politicians have to kill great science projects for their own political vandettas?"
Triana != science (Score:5, Insightful)
There was originally no science planned. Only when scrutiny increased to it were some basic instruments added to make the excuse of it being a research tool float.
Just a heads up, the only thing Triana would have really done was take pictures of the earth for posting on a website to 'make people feel better about the earth'. For a working alternative, please visit the NOAA website where legions of weather satellites already do this 24x7.
Triana was a waste of a rocket launch. Hopefully the chassis can be adapted to perform some real science.
Re:Sign of the times (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to mention how little of a percentage the nasa budget is, but it still gets cut
Re:Triana != science (Score:2, Insightful)
According to the article, at least, the mission was run past the National Academy of Science. NAS said that it had the potential to make unique scientific contributions and was worth funding. Anyone who looks at what they want to do can see that it has some very powerful potential for various types of environmental monitoring. It makes you wonder if the people who want to kill it are afraid of what the science it will produce will say.
From a scientific standpoint Triana was STUPID (Score:1, Insightful)
NOAA-NCAR-CIMSS -ask someone that does anything sorta kinda related to satellite meteorology and works for one of those acronyms and they'd tell you all about it. Millions of dollars spent for some half-ass idea Al Gore had. Money that could have been spent on real science.
I dunno... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Vandettas" aside, (they sang back-up for Martha [history-of-rock.com], right?), this project doesn't inspire a huge amount of confidence in me. It started out as a stunt by Al Gore, and while scientists may have come up with useful uses for it (which I'm not qualified to judge), I'd be a lot more enthusiastic about a project that was designed to do something useful in the first place.
My sense this is like the biology experiments they do on the space shuttle, something I am qualified to judge. They're worth doing, given that the shuttle is already going but they're hardly a justification for the shuttle program.
As an aside, which may make you feel better, I heard a talk recently by one of the leaders of the Chandra telescope project. Asked about the security of funding, he said that while legislators aren't going to give more money, they pretty much all appreciate astronomy and space and the stream of money isn't in jeopardy at all.
Re:As if you had to ask... (Score:3, Insightful)
*cough* Repost *cough* (Score:4, Insightful)
As for the project, there was clearly nothing vaguely scientific in the original plan but it was subsequently expanded to include a whole host of "scientific" things to encourage its approval. Of course, with the increase in things it needed to accomplish, the price went up. It's hardly surprising that a pet project like this got cut.
Dancin Santa
Re:Triana != science (Score:3, Insightful)
So what? Sometimes it's very important to popularize space exploration. Who cares if all it would have done was to take pictures of the Earth? Maybe that would get some children to be more interested in the Earth? Maybe over the span of a decade, we could see any climactic and atmospheric changes that may have occured? Never mind the exploration of a LaGrange point. Weather satellites are situated in geosynchronous orbits, so they're like 30,000 miles away or so? Triana would have been 1,000,000 miles away. That would have been a VERY different vantage point.
The fact of the matter is, it would have been good for space exploration. It would have contributed to some public interest, which is good, because that's where the money comes from. The satellite is already done, and they've invested over $100 million in it. Yes, I know it's quite expensive to launch satellites, also. I do not advocate throwing good money after bad, but from the looks of things, Triana wasn't all bad.
Gore' satellite was stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
I stll think we should do it, but we should never have spent $120M on the satellite and more on the now scrubbed launch.
We already have cameras taking pictures of the earth all the time. The weather sats and other instruments are constantly recording the earth.
As such it would cost a very small amount to develop software to integrate those pictures to generate an image of what the planet would look like from any point, including L1. With enough work you could get it so you could not tell the difference.
Yes, it wouldn't be "real" to some people. But it would be true, and that's real enough for me.
Re:Triana != science (Score:3, Insightful)
What's more likely to interest kids in space?
1) $125M to buy a screen saver with a picture of Earth that could be done today with a little software and a data feed from our fleet of weather satellites?
or
2) $125M to buy a nice economy Mars probe.
(Of course, most of our cheap-o Mars probes don't arouse interest in space exploration because NASA fsckups turn them into Earth-originated meteorites leaving little craters on the Martian surface, but that's beside the point ;-)
Re:As if you had to ask... (Score:2, Insightful)
If you're running the House, and your party recommends drilling, lumber, mining, burning fossil fuels, all in a valiant attempt to spur the economy, you probably don't want people to see what damage all this "economic recovery" is doing. Particularly with the difficulty encountered in trying to explore (not even drill, yet) for oil in ANWR
Not gonna fly until after 2004... (Score:5, Insightful)