No, I haven't run out of overly punny titles yet.
By the way, I'm sorry about making everyone wait a week for a new posting. I could have done this earlier, of course, but my recent participation in the trucking industry has made it hard. I'm sure everyone who actually has a regular job is now crying me a river... well, anyway-- on with the show.
With the recent end of NASA's epic Galileo mission to Jupiter, the incomparable Steven Den Beste wrote a typically long and winding treatise about how great the history of unmanned space probes has been. Except for those rather famous Martian failures. He started out talking about orbital mechanics, and why Galileo was intentionally crashed into Jupiter (aside from the scientific data gained before destruction)-- but then came to mention just about every space probe program in the history of the United States, right up through the sophisticated and Saturn-bound Cassini.
Then, having left a concept of orbital mechanics insufficiently explained, Mr. Den Beste has an entire post on the slingshot effect.
I agree that unmanned probes are really neat. They have told us far more about the solar system than we can see from Earth, of course. Many questions have been answered, only to unearth new ones. Discovery, you see, is an ongoing process. Having learned, for example, that the surface of Venus is uniformly about half a billion years old, we now wonder how the heck that happened.
Indeed, Venus is an excellent justification for studying other planets. Despite being the 'closest' planet, and very similar to Earth in size, it is easily the most alien of the rocky planets. How did it get that way? Is it entirely because Venus is slightly closer to the Sun? Could Earth ever become a similar waterless wasteland, where atmospheric pressure would crush a submarine, and the very rocks are baked to a hardness that puts concrete to shame?
Of course, some people don't need to rationalize the search for knowledge. They just want to know the heretofore unknown, and that's that. These "scientists," as we call them, are insatiably curious. I should know, since I am one.
Posted by Mitch at October 4, 2003 04:23 AM