What a day! Not my day, per se. Mine's been nice and simple. A bit of housework, a run to recycling, a touch of weed sampling and now dinner coming up. Rather, I was thinking of the planet orbiter Cassini. Today it is ending it's career in the atmosphere of Saturn. All those years up there all alone, using the gravity of Titan to swing around the big gas giant, snapping a bounty of photos of rings, moons and our little planet Earth from oh so many millions of miles away.
Take a moment to read through the article below snatched out of the New York Times. Dig into it a bit and read the accompanying article that highlights 100 photos from the space mission. It was pennies on the dollar well spent, a program that was close to not going up at all. We are all so much the better for having sent that bit of metal out there to do our investigative work for us. No dogs, monkeys or people were harmed in the snapping of those photos.
Yeah, money well spent, US and European alike. We do all sorts of outrageous things with our government dollars. We wage war on drugs, we lock people up in prison, we pay the salaries of many Republican congressmen who go out of their way to impede the will of the people and we, unfortunately, send a lot of good folks off to fight little brown skinned people in far away foreign lands. But on the good side, we help restore lives after horrific natural events, we feed kids free lunches, we conserve land through public parks, we fund museums and libraries and through cool agencies like NASA we send elaborate devices out into the heavens to get the best photos of planets money can buy.
I thought it was a mighty big thing, as a boy, to watch the moon landings on an old black and white set, fuzzy connection and all. To put folks on the moon was awesome, something we have not duplicated or replicated on other moons since. While we're waiting to go again we send other kinds of crafts out into the solar system and beyond, just to see what we can see. Cassini was a by product of the Voyager program. That one passed by the big guy and we said, holy cow, we gotta see more of this!
Well, we did and here you go. To see the results of what that orbiter sent back is and will always be, I imagine, mind blowing and never to be duplicated. The magnificent, fear inducing winter storms swirling the atmospheric surface above Jupiter, the geysers on Enceladus sending off salt water plumes into space that settle back down onto the planet as alien snow, the many moons of Saturn weaving beautiful woven patterns into the planet's rings, is the stuff of fantasy. Our THC addled brains, always awake and thrilled to witness new and ever present wonders, could never, in a lifetime of toking, come up with the wonders of the imagery you are about to witness. This is no science fiction CGI, no movie studio magic, no work of pen or paint. This is the real deal.
So, fire up a bowl and get ready to have your imagination be fired up, too.
Thanks, Cassini for sending back all those mighty fine images. May your molecules find happiness there on the surface of Saturn.
Salud!
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/14/science/cassini-grand-finale-saturn.html?emc=eta1
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