Hen Step

Philip J. Davis

“Charge Beam”

This one is technically not yet history, because at the time of posting, the little craft has about half an hour left to go.  That said, let’s proceed.

In 2017, NASA’s Cassini space probe ended its twenty-year mission at Saturn.  After a nearly-seven-year-long journey there, it orbited the ringed planet for 13 years and just over two months, gathering copious amounts of information about the planet, said rings, and many of its moons.  It landed an ESA probe called Huygens on Titan, the first-ever soft landing in the outer Solar System.  It discovered lakes, seas, and rivers of methane on Titan, geysers of water erupting from Enceladus (and passed within 50 miles of that moon’s surface), and found gigantic, raging hurricanes at both of Saturn’s poles.  

And the images it returned are beautiful enough to make you weep.

On this day in 2017, with the fuel for Cassini’s directional thrusters running low, the probe was de-orbited into the Saturnian atmosphere to prevent any possibility of any contamination of possible biotic environments on Titan or Enceladus.  The remaining thruster fuel was used to keep the radio dish pointed towards Earth so the probe could transmit information about the upper atmosphere of Saturn while it was burning up due to atmospheric friction.

This is us at our best.  We spent no small amount of money on a nuclear-powered robot, launched it into space, sent it a billion miles away, and worked with it for two decades just to learn about another planet.  And when the repeatedly-extended missions were through, we made the little craft sacrifice itself like a samurai, performing its duty as long as it could while it became a shooting star in the Saturnian sky.

Rhea occulting Saturn

Water geysers on Enceladus

Strange Iapetus

Look at this gorgeousness

A gigantic motherfucking storm in Saturn’s northern hemisphere

Tethys

This image is from the surface of a moon of a planet at least 746 million miles away.  Sweet lord

Mimas

Vertical structures in the rings.  Holy shit

Titan and Dione occulting Saturn, rings visible

Little Daphnis making gravitational ripples in the rings

That’s here.  That’s home.  That’s all of us that ever lived.

Saturn, backlit

A polar vortex on the gas giant

Icy Enceladus

link is a highly versatile adventurer who wears light armour and consistently plays an instrument and usually has access to magic items and occasionally some spells

how could you ever remember something if you dont even fully understand it?

I’m too young to remember.

I spent a while trying to understand what could lead someone to such bitter resentful hatred.

I understand is that there’s no reason to believe that those people were somehow different than us. The same with Nazis. The same with Soviets. The same with The scientists in Unit 731.

There’s no “them.” Acts of purposeful suffering, destruction, and horrible evil are not outside of the human experience.

if you think you arent capable of flying a plane into a building, killing thousands of people, breaking an entire nation, and stirring up major conflict in the middle east, you are dead wrong.

and if you say you could never do something like that in any situation, then it’s likely you are far more prone to it than you realize.

knowing that evil that stirs within all of us is vital to ending things like this. The shadow of every human stretches all the way to hell.