This is cool. You read the headline and you think, Oh no, the Cassini craft has been hit by a hailstorm, the mission is about to fail... and of course it turns out the machine was designed to take the punishment. Now that's cool.
By Robert Roy BrittSo the Cassini craft is fine. It's only Chicken-Little-Reporting on the vines that gave us the scary headline. The bastards! :)
Senior Science Writer, SPACE.com
The Cassini spacecraft was hit by storms of dust as it passed through Saturn's rings twice just before going into orbit June 30.
Cassini sliced through known gaps in the rings so that it wouldn't be destroyed by huge icy boulders. But the gaps are not entirely empty, it turns out.
Cassini was peppered by microscopic bits of dust that slammed into it at about 45,000 mph (20 kilometers per second). At the peak of activity, 680 bits per second pummeled the probe, according to the website Science.NASA (news - web sites).gov.
The impacts were recorded and converted to a sound file that is available on the Internet.
"When we crossed the ring plane, we had roughly 100,000 total dust hits in less than five minutes," said Cassini science team member Don Gurnett, of the University of Iowa. Gurnett said the bits were about the size of particles in cigarette smoke.
Most of the dust hit the spacecraft's high-gain antenna, which was designed to handle such impacts. No apparent damage was done.
Each impacting particle generated a puff of superheated, ionized gas called plasma. Cassini's Radio and Plasma Wave Science (RPWS) instrument recorded the puffs.
"We converted these into audible sounds that resemble hail hitting a tin roof," said Gurnett, who is the instrument's principal investigator.
In other observations, the probe gained new insight into the composition of the icy, dirty rings. Cassini has begun a four-year tour of Saturn, with plans to study its rings and moons in several close flybys.
Return of the Duque
One of my favourite Yankees in their 1998-200 run of World Series conquests was pitcher Orlando Hernandez, a.k.a. 'El Duque'. There are many stories about El Duque, but to cut his long and winding story short, he's the first Cuban Ace to break out of Cuba and land on the Yankee roster. Others have followed, but not with the same kind of outlandish success the tough-minded righty attained in his first stay with the Yankees. After the 2002 Post-Season debacle against the Annaheim Angels who went on to win the World Series that year, the Yankee brass did a bit of house-cleaning and shipped Orlando Hernandez to the White Sox in a 3-way trade that eventually saw him in Montreal. There, he sustained a shoulder injury in spring training and never pitched an inning for his 4 million dollar contract that year. This Spring,he signed a Minor League deal with the Yankees and just when the Yankee arms were running out of fuel, voila, he's back. Not only that, he reprised his debut of 1998 and beat the Devil Rays, one more time. Amazing.
"So much emotion today," Hernandez said in English after a question posed to him in Spanish. "I'm excited, I'm feeling good. I'm happy today to come back to the Yankees again. It's the life. I need the work. I waited a long time to come back to the Yankees and pitch."The guy's a one-of-a-kind. So that's the really cool thing for the day for me. Otherwise, my life is in total chaos. Kind of an emotional freefall, if you will, without a parachute. Details will be presented here at a later date, hopefully when I get through the jungle of ghosts.
The legend of Hernandez began with the story of a daring escape from Cuba, which might have been exaggerated, and winks about his age, which might be exaggerated the other way. He says he's 34 but is believed to be at least 38.
The legend continued with a knack for big-game pitching, which is all true (he's 9-3 in the postseason). He was 53-38 for the Yankees after defecting from Cuba in December 1997; after going 12-12 his final two seasons, he was part of a three-way trade in January 2003 in which the Yankees sent him to the White Sox and Chicago sent him to Montreal. He never pitched for the Expos because of his injury.
Before the first pitch, Hernandez walked behind the mound and gestured toward his fielders - positioning them, or introducing himself? The only players on the field who were Hernandez's teammates with the Yankees in 2002 were Jeter, Bernie Williams and Jorge Posada.
- Art Neuro
No comments:
Post a Comment