Man of Honour
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
100,329
Location
South Coast
Cassini–Huygens photo footage from its arrival at Saturn. This episode of Cosmos reminded me that our solar system has 4 ringed planets and it also reminded me of how far we are capable of taking human intelligence no matter what else is going on around the world. Worth noting that the Pathfinder probe also landed on Mars in 1997, the same year Cassini–Huygens launched. Watching this made me quite sad, all I could imagine was Wall-E sat there on Titan watching his sibling plunge into Saturn's atmosphere to end its life.

The reason for the plunge was because our solar system has several categories of planets and asteroids that could contain life and the risk of contamination is too high should they contain life, so the safest option is to kill the probes.

 
Man of Honour
Joined
5 Dec 2003
Posts
20,999
Location
Just to the left of my PC
I found this oddly interesting, so here it is. Superglue and exothermic reactions with stuff. Quite strongly exothermic, with >100C temperature increase in seconds. With that and the fumes, it's not entirely safe. But they do get some nice castings from it.

 
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