Is it weird to say thanks here to all the planetary science people from NASA and related orgs (JPL, SWRI, UofA etc) who create these amazing science missions? New Horizons, the Mars rovers, Cassini, SDO, Juno, Messenger, Hubble, Stereo, and all the others that slipped my memory...
I've been watching, kind of enraptured for a long time, and obsessively read about older ones such as the Pioneers and Voyagers(!!). Been through some bad personal times, and as odd as it may be watching all this stuff has helped push back the darkness. If you don't have your sense of wonder piqued by seeing mankind's first image of a cryovolcano on a moon of Saturn... the first closeup of the surface of Pluto... watching rovers drive around on Mars... amazing solar time lapses... well somethin' is flat up busted with your sense of wonder. I know lots of science data isn't optical, but all I can do there is read overviews of what the scientists are figuring out.
If it were up to me you would get like 10X the budget. Cassini-like missions for Uranus and Neptune. Landers / rovers / quadcopters for the major S & J moons. A modern Venus lander. Space based coronagraphs for exoplanet atmospheric spectra something something. DSN upgrades to handle it all.
It isn't up to me though.
Still, please know, no matter what daily grind problems happen along the way, these missions over the decades have earned their place among the most amazing accomplishments of our species.
so... yeah.
Edit DNS -> DSN
Submitted November 25, 2017 at 10:58PM by TheWayBackMachine http://ift.tt/2i6UbDW
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