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)
But only a good way... (Score:2)
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> "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".
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Good way to start an inter-solar system war.
Except that Enceladus is a moon of Saturn, which is in our solar system. Therefore it would be an intra- solar system war.
Assuming of course that a moon with no inhabitants somehow had a way to retaliate. But we can ignore that part for now since you were trying to be funny.
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uh oh (Score:1)
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No.
The slang "skeeting", "shooting skeet", etc. in regards to ejaculation is a reference to skeet shooting, in real life.
Launching clay pigeons (traditionally grey or white, now colored bright yellow or green or pink) at a low angle for target practice is not sexual.
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That's like calling saying "Don Quixote rode her ass" and not expecting people to be thinking he just did the nasty with some windmill operator's daughter. We're filthy, immature creatures who never grew out of chuckling when you hear homo erectus. Take the classic riddle: What's a four-letter word for a woman ending in "unt?"
Protip: It begins with "A."
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"Signed"? (Score:2)
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Damn, at last Slashdot has incorporated my last non-/. geekery, the study of Mesoamerican languages. I am one with the Borg.
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What is with the "Signed" tag that is appearing on pretty much every /. story at the moment? What does it mean?
The last time we had a spurt like that in tags, it came from the "don't tase me, bro" video. I suspect some goonies will probably start tagging with "dontsignmebro" tags.
The top results from youtube for "signed" are currently mostly related to Stevie Wonder. I somehow have a hard time imagining him running around applying this tag on slashdot.
Too many dirty jokes (Score:2)
Skeet shoot? Eruption sites? E ring? Closest approach to the south pole? Unsmeared? ...error, too many possible dirty jokes! AAAH! (head asplodes)
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Finally! (Score:1)
(For righties, naturally.)
--j!m
And for their next trick (Score:1)
Camera Technology (Score:3, Interesting)
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> The pilot would overfly his target at tree-top level, to avoid enemy anti-aircraft fire. The camera had to compensate for the apparent motion of
> the target.
Let's hope this time the Americans are more successful than in Vietnam, eh?
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Yep, you can buy the cameras at Surplus Shed actually. (or you could last I checked ... like a year ago)
I imagine the tricky part is getting the correct film.
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Unsmearing (Score:2)
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Deconvolutions are generally iffy under any but the most ideal of circumstances, in my experience. With the point-spread function being what it is (complicated, that's what), we're not in the best of circumstances, either.
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I actually meant the intrinsic PSF for the camera, which is somewhat complicated as it turns out. We've actually considered de-blurring before, but I don't think we had a lot of luck with it and it didn't seem worth it. I can recall trying to deconvolve Enceladus's bright limb with the PSF before and having that turn out awfully. For these, considering the speed, I think that de-blurring would be neigh impossible.
(It's also worth noting that we're aiming for science-class images here and not so just pub
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If you convolve noisy images with some filter, some information is irretrievably lost.
Do white people still not know? (Score:1)
rocket science (Score:3, Informative)
2 wind-up orbits around the sun, 2 gravitational slingshot maneuvers by Venus, one each by Earth and Jupiter, all with only 1 course correction. Then *7 years* later it goes into orbit around Saturn! Oh, and it is powered with Plutonium.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/bd/Cassini_interplanet_trajectory.svg [wikimedia.org]
It then sweeps by Enceladus 22 times, drops a probe on Titan, and does countless other science experiments and images
this is why the call it "rocket science". wow
makes you realize how someone might fo'get about metric and english systems.
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?