by Flase » Sat Jan 21, 2012 11:06 pm
I know Uranus is off topic but I'll always be impressed by the achievements of the Voyager project. The bloke who realised that all the gas giants would line up and there was an opportunity to kill so many birds with one stone, if you will, he should be proud of himself.
I'm still disappointed they couldn't have cameras as good as this on the Dawn probe. When I took maths and physics at school, I was told "draw a picture" and it will help you see the problem for what it is. I just know that images for human eyes will help human scientists see possibilities, if they are still mortal. I don't think the decision makers really know why they even send these probes, just the idea that the more esoteric the information they gather, the more scientific it is. I blame the military and bean counters. No matter how good a mathematician somebody is, they still have to be a servant and may not have their own ideas. If you do, you have to be like Einstein and hide them from your boss as you work some lousy job (his was in a patent office). Besides which, the better the pictures of the asteroids, the more popular it will be, affecting the bottom line for the bean counters and you can pick up a digital camera (< 0.2kg) for under $100, just plug it into a USB port and it will give you better quality than Voyager. If it's worth a billion bucks to send a probe, it's worth another hundred.
I know Uranus is off topic but I'll always be impressed by the achievements of the Voyager project. The bloke who realised that all the gas giants would line up and there was an opportunity to kill so many birds with one stone, if you will, he should be proud of himself.
[img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3d/Uranus2.jpg/480px-Uranus2.jpg[/img]
I'm still disappointed they couldn't have cameras as good as this on the Dawn probe. When I took maths and physics at school, I was told "draw a picture" and it will help you see the problem for what it is. I just know that images for human eyes will help human scientists see possibilities, if they are still mortal. I don't think the decision makers really know why they even send these probes, just the idea that the more esoteric the information they gather, the more scientific it is. I blame the military and bean counters. No matter how good a mathematician somebody is, they still have to be a servant and may not have their own ideas. If you do, you have to be like Einstein and hide them from your boss as you work some lousy job (his was in a patent office). Besides which, the better the pictures of the asteroids, the more popular it will be, affecting the bottom line for the bean counters and you can pick up a digital camera (< 0.2kg) for under $100, just plug it into a USB port and it will give you better quality than Voyager. If it's worth a billion bucks to send a probe, it's worth another hundred.