Cassini To "Skeet-Shoot" Enceladus 41
CheshireCatCO writes "When Cassini makes its closest approach (50 km) during the flyby of the moon Enceladus next Monday 11 August, the spacecraft will be zipping by too quickly to turn and image in the usual way. So the Cassini team will be trying something new: a 'skeet-shoot' of the surface. The spacecraft will start to spin before the closest approach to the south pole so that when the best resolution is possible, the moon will drift through the field of view slowly enough to acquire unsmeared images. Of interest are the eruption-sites on the surface that give rise to the plume extending thousands of kilometers into space and producing Saturn's E ring. This flyby will be optimized for the imaging instruments (ISS, VIMS, CIRS, and UVS) in contrast with the March flyby, which was designed for the fields-and-particles instruments."
Oh great (Score:2, Funny)
Re:But only a good way... (Score:2, Funny)
> "When Cassini makes its closest approach (50 km) during the flyby of the
> moon Enceladus next Monday 11 August, the spacecraft will be zipping by
> too quickly to turn and image in the usual way"
And here I thought Eve Online was making up a whole bunch of BS in the name of "game balancing".
It was a sound studio on Mars (Score:1, Funny)
Why should a tiny portion of taxpayer money go to something like this when we could spend billions of dollars on much more worthwhile endeavors, like building a while along our southern border, or bombing developing countries based on bad intelligence? It's an outrage that this country is willing to pour a fraction of a percent of total governmental funding into such a useless program. What good ever came of peaceful exploration and the research and development to make it all possible?