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Politics : CONSPIRACY THEORIES -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: longnshort who wrote (125)	1/25/2005 10:09:23 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Respond to of 418

Sort of... To concede that Huygens-Cassini ended up a dud would have been the kiss of death for ESA... it would have been a flop too many: Jumbo-launcher Ariane 5, Beagle, and now Huygens? And all the farmers of Poland, France, Germany crying out for more welfare subsidies while ESA astronerds keep squandering zillions of euros on space probes straying in outer space???? LOL... Under public opinion's pressure, EU elites would have had no choice but to pull the plug on their ESA extravaganza --much to NASA's chagrin. Let's not forget that Russia, the EU and the US have entered an informal division of labor of sorts: the US can no longer take up the space burden alone! And if Europe can't keep up then... the first man to land on Mars will be a taikonaut!! Gus

To: longnshort who wrote (125)	1/27/2005 5:10:17 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Respond to of 418

I found him!! LOL.... I NAILED him!!! LOL... Here's our PHOTO-ARTIST of the Year: ESA Astronerd Boris Smeds --ESA's "unsung hero" as they put it: Titan Calling How a Swedish engineer saved a once-in-a-lifetime mission to Saturn's mysterious moon By James Oberg LAST JUNE, SCIENTISTS WERE THRILLED when NASA's Cassini probe successfully began orbiting Saturn after a 3.5-billion-kilometer, seven-year journey across the solar system. The 6-ton spacecraft immediately started returning spectacular pictures of the planet, its rings, and its 30-plus moons. It was just the beginning of Cassini's four-year tour of Saturn's neighborhood, and while scientists expect amazing discoveries in the years to come, the most dramatic chapter in the mission's history will happen this January, when scientists attempt to peek beneath the atmospheric veil that surrounds Saturn's largest moon, Titan—a chapter that might have ended in disaster, save for one persistent engineer. In a collaboration with the European Space Agency, Cassini, in addition to its own suite of scientific instruments designed to scan Saturn and its moons, carries a hitchhiker—a lander probe called Huygens. A stubby cone 3 meters across, Huygens was built for a single purpose: to pierce the cloaking methane atmosphere of Titan and report its findings back to Cassini for relay to Earth. So it was quite a shock when Boris Smeds, a graying, Swedish, 26-year ESA veteran [see photo, "Unsung Hero"], who normally specializes in solving problems related to the agency's network of ground stations, discovered in early 2000 that Cassini's receiver was in danger of scrambling Huygens's data beyond recognition. Making that discovery would lead Smeds from his desk in Darmstadt, Germany, to an antenna farm deep in California's Mojave Desert, after he and his allies battled bureaucracy and disbelief to push through a test program tough enough to reveal the existence of Cassini-Huygens's communications problem. In doing so, Smeds continued a glorious engineering tradition of rescuing deep-space missions from doom with sheer persistence, insight, and lots of improvisation. spectrum.ieee.org Quite a yarn to cover up ESA's umpteenth flop, eh? Boris Smeds was given scores of INEDITED Martian pics (not hard to find in a 175,000+ image-store!) and uploaded them all to the Cassini orbiter in early 2001 () --and Bob's your uncle! Thank you indeed, Mr Smeds! Thank you for giving ESA a new lease on life! Gus () scienceblog.com Excerpt: Once the fix was agreed, "all sorts" of studies were done to confirm the expected results, says Sollazzo; "we got a 'new' mission that is very robust and provides essentially 100 percent of the originally planned data," he says. ________________________ A "new mission that is very robust" indeed! LOL....