Cav's Place

Since it’s Sunday and I’m still waiting for another update about Opportunity to be posted, I guess I could mention that tomorrow Cassini will celebrate ten years of exploring Saturn and its system of moons and rings. During this time, it returned a huge amount of useful data and generated thousands of scientific reports, and it can be said to be more or less responsible for much of what we know about the Saturn system in general, and for most of our current understanding of Titan in particular.
It also appears that the name for what will unfortunately be the final phase of the mission, starting in late 2016 and ending the following year with the spacecraft being sent into the gas giant to be destroyed, should also be announced these days. Doubt the choice will be suitable, however, seeing as the moment will mark the end of our presence on or around any planet beyond Jupiter, and also be near enough to the end of our presence on or around any celestial body beyond Mars, with the Juno mission also set to end in 2017 and Dawn possibly as early as late 2015. Sure, we’ll still have the Voyagers, and New Horizons may continue to operate as well, but those will be speeding through the vastness of space…

While I’m at anniversaries, however, I’ll also mention the fact that Curiosity has completed the first Martian year since landing on the red planet this Tuesday. I can still honestly say I don’t exactly care about that thing, due to the fact that it uses nuclear power when Opportunity has proven solar panels to be sufficient on the surface of Mars and Juno is set to do the same while operating in orbit around Jupiter, but I guess that’s no reason not to mark the moment at least.