NASA at Saturn. Cassini's Grand Finale.

[longship]

X-posted from GD.

From JPL, an incredible video:

It starts on April 22.

For reference, Carolyn Porco's awesome, inspiring TED Talk on Cassini:

Much earlier in the mission.

Enjoy. It hardly gets any better than this.

[CherokeeDem]

1. Wow.....

Incredible!

Thank you for posting!!!!

[longship]

2. Happy to oblige.

[PsychoBabble]

3. How inspiring! How aspirational. And then ...

... to have to return to the reality of the small-minded GOP/45 world.

No inspiration.

No aspiration.

Except to greed, smallness, cruelty.

Sad.

Bigly ...

[longship]

4. Thanks. And I agree.

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

5. Titan in the thumbnail bugs me more than it should

I just wish they had decided to fling Cassini out to Uranus on a hope and a prayer it is alive and ticking in twenty years.

[longship]

7. Do you mean after Saturn, Uranus?

The reason they are crashing Cassini into Saturn is because it is out of fuel and they do not want Cassini to accidentally crash its microbe infested self into a body that might host other life.

So a Uranus mission was not in the cards. Maneuvering for such a thing would be impossible. Not enough fuel. Ergo, the dive into Saturn.

That's kind of the rationale, I suspect.

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

8. Flinging Cassini off to Uranus was one of the end-of-life scenarios

It was rejected because even if it survived another twenty years it would be difficult to assemble a science team for the Uranus encounter.

[longship]

9. I see. I hadn't heard that. Thx. nt

[Frequent Ranter]

6. We build 'em Good

Our space probes almost always outlast their official lifespan. We truly are a great country, despite the Orangutan Spawn in the White House.

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

10. In 2006 I was sitting in a hotel lobby in Toulouse France

I was talking to a young Iranian couple, we were all early and they didn't have rooms ready.

The man had asked me how I found traveling abroad with Bush in office and I just said as soon as I say I am from California and the people who voted for Bush would execute people like me given the opportunity any tension I have encountered goes away.

Then he said something that really stuck with me, he said although his parents were British educated and his family wasn't religious he wasn't immune to the antipathy towards the US that swept Iranian society. But he said when he was in school and the Voyager probe reached Neptune it had a huge effect on him. He said it felt like the little mermaid "I just don't see how people that do such amazing things could be bad." Every time he saw the pictures it was just "Americans did this, Americans did this."

[Frequent Ranter]

11. We Represent the Best of Humanity, and the Worst

I dunno, maybe this is exactly why we've become a world leader.

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

12. I think Islamic fundamentalists have a monopoly on "the worst of humanity"

The worst of America in 2017 doesn't really come within a mile of what ISIS and their contemporaries get up to.

[Frequent Ranter]

14. "2017" being the Key

Past centuries of slavery, committed by us, exceed the Johnny-come-latelies of kooks who claim to be Muslim.

[Warren DeMontague]

13. It's been an incredible mission.

Priceless science and knowledge, not to mention some of the best photographs taken in human history.