FWIS3

Heard a nice story on NPR earlier this week. Some of the project engineers for Cassini have been working on it for 15, 25, more than 30 years! An entire career, one project. Although the mission was more successful than anticipated, many of these people are still very sad. Ont talked about going through all the phases of grief and mourning.
I get it.

I watched the end of mission this morning. That's one of my favorite things to do--to watch the control room at a space agency during a mission's important moments. Recently I watched the New Horizons flyby (ok, that's not really recent) and the Philae landing/bouncing on the comet. It's so inspiring to watch engineers and scientists who are so passionate about what they do, letting us in on these intimate moments.

It was playing while the kids were getting ready for school and so I had them watch and told them how exciting it was. That's what's going to inspire them to go into something they love!

Glad you got to share with the kids. I watched as well. Don't tell my boss.

I watched and was sad. I will miss Cassini.

I thought it was very fascinating that they decided to crash Cassini into Saturn in order to avoid the (very small) chance that it might crash into one of the moons and contaminate it with earth microbes.

Yeah, they are really pretty strict on trying to avoid contaminating places. Wish we could be a little more strict around here.

Thumper wrote:Yeah, they are really pretty strict on trying to avoid contaminating places. Wish we could be a little more strict around here.

It would be nice if we treated our home a bit better.

Watched a special on Discovery, Friday evening. An hour long show "Saturn: Inside The Rings", dedicated to the Cassini mission, including the final moments from Friday morning and the emotions of team scientists and engineers at JPL. Also mentioned the ideas for future missions being developed from info gained from Cassini/Huygens.