Cassini a story

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                             CASSINI 
                       A Message To Nobody

                               by
                         A. H. Wakamatsu


     The final end came like hammer blows upon one's heart. 
We had tracked the string of asteroids for thirty eight hours,
the problem was we had no way to divert them, we were helpless.
So unerringly they came, minuscule missiles of detritus, bound for this 
pitiful lunar refuge.  It had been five extremely hectic years and now it 
seems for naught; regrettably several utility buildings were damaged, but 
the parting blow was the direct meteor hit to our backup nuclear reactor. 
 And because of this accident our fledgling moon colony is doomed, 
henceforth all of humanity is doomed.
	Doom started eight years ago when the Cassini spacecraft instead 
of swinging by Earth as planned, crashed back into the atmosphere and 
burnt up, thereby distributing seventy-two point three pounds of 
plutonium into the stratosphere of Earth, August 20, 1999.  Instantly 
doom became a way of life.
	Just one pound of plutonium distributed in our atmosphere can 
bestow upon everyone on this planet fatal lung cancer, seventy pounds of 
plutonium appears to be a significant amount, at least enough to 
sterilize Earth of all breathing creatures, so far.  Like the media said 
it couldn't have been any better if we scientists had planned to expunge 
Earth of all life except plants, bacteria and viruses, and eventually, 
even they will be hard pressed to survive the onslaught of the relentless 
radiation.
	To tell you the truth, back when the mission was being designed, 
we at NASA were more concerned about the launch; the Cassini mission 
would have sent one of the largest and heaviest robotic spacecraft ever 
built on a seven year journey to Saturn.
	Back in the early nineties, JPL had given us several trajectory 
scenarios, the optimum involved Cassini first being launched towards the 
inner planet Venus, using the planet's gravity as an assist to slingshot 
the vehicle back towards Earth, then subsequently past Jupiter.  
	These close flybys were designed to impart enough energy to 
Cassini to reach Saturn and establish an orbit around the ringed planet. 
 To have any success, because of the relative positions of the planets, 
Cassini's launch window was between October 6, 1997 and November 4, 1997, 
any later and the mission would have been degraded somewhat.  But as 
anyone knows who's in the business of space exploration, the launch is 
the real scary part.
	Even with the gravity assists, Cassini is so massive, (two 
stories tall and weighing in at 6,000kg-13,000lbs) to accomplish liftoff 
and placement into the correct trajectory we at NASA had to cobble 
together a military Titan IV launch vehicle with two newly developed 
strap-on solid rocket motors, and a powerful Centaur upper stage, 
creating essentially a four stage rocket.
	And this was where the public centered most of their protests.  A 
failure at launch time could expose the public to nominal health hazards 
if any of the three radioisotope thermoelectric generators, RTGs, leaked 
plutonium at that time.  However extensive testing by the Department of 
Energy has demonstrated the effectiveness of RTGs in containing their 
plutonium in case there was a launch accident.
	Ironically the swing-by of Earth in 1999 was supposed to be the 
safer risk with an inadvertent atmospheric reentry a million to one 
chance.  When I think about it though, I used to buy lottery tickets with 
odds of thirteen million to one, in hopes of winning.
	As a scientist you start to wonder about the progression and 
direction our decision tree took, that led to the destruction of life as 
we once knew it.  RTGs have been used on twenty three previous U.S. space 
missions, including the Apollo missions to the moon, the Pioneer missions 
to Jupiter and Saturn, the Galileo mission to Jupiter and the Ulysses 
solar mission.  Perhaps though we should have more closely examined our 
failures and mistakes: Apollo 13, SkyLab, the Nimbus B Weather Satellite, 
 Challenger, the Hubble, the Mars Observer, and the Tethered Satellite 
Space Shuttle mission.
	These are just the major ones, add in all the failed military 
missions and minor snafu's and the questionable reliability of the Titan 
IV booster and you start to wonder what we were thinking.  Not to mention 
Russia's fiasco when one of their satellites failed to stay in orbit and 
plunged into the Siberian countryside spreading radioactive isotopes over 
a 400,000 acre area.  Obviously the roots of our decision tree were 
rotten from the very beginning, and we had just been very lucky in the 
past.
	Now however, I can see clearly how we were romanced into 
believing that what we were doing was the proper thing.  First there is 
Saturn, the mysterious seductress herself, the crowning jewel of the 
solar system.  As an astro-physicist any opportunity one could concoct to 
accrue more data on Saturn and its intricate system of moons, moonlets 
and rings seem to be appropriate.  The clues to the formation of the 
solar system and other solar systems could be concealed in that data.  
The wealth of data Cassini would have brought back, we astro-physicists 
would have killed for, readily, like spellbound fools.
	Another factor was the time constraints, it was either now or 
never, the JPL trajectories demanded a strict timetable.  Perhaps with 
more time an alternative like the ultra-sensitive solar cells developed 
by the Europeans could have been utilized. Unfortunately the project from 
the beginning had been planned using the RTGs because of the heavy 
electrical demands of the Cassini instrument platform.  
	This list of instruments includes: an imaging science subsystem, 
a ground mapping radar, a radio science subsystem, an ion and neutral 
mass spectrometer, a visible and infrared mapping spectrometer, a 
composite infrared spectrometer, a cosmic dust analyzer, a radio and 
plasma wave spectrometer, a plasma spectrometer, an ultraviolet imaging 
spectrometer, a magnetospheric imaging instrument and finally, a dual 
technique magnetometer.  In our avariciousness for new astronomical data, 
we scientists scaled up the project to its present size, jeopardizing all 
of humanity.  
	Sometimes I can't stop thinking that Saturn with all its alluring 
beauty and complexity was some kind of bait for an evil inter-stellar, 
cosmic rat trap.
	If all things had gone even modestly okay, by June, 2004, Cassini 
would have commenced its Saturn Orbit Insertion Maneuver, firing its main 
engines and decelerating, finally reaching its mission objective of 
orbiting Saturn.  God, we would've been just swimming in pools of joyous, 
precious data by then.
	By late 2004, Cassini would have released the Huygens probe, 
which was designed and built by the European Space Agency.  Deploying 
drogue chutes, its purpose was to descend towards Saturn's moon Titan, 
penetrate Titan's thick and enigmatic atmosphere and hopefully send data 
back about its composition.
	The Huygens probe itself carried: a descent imager and spectral 
radiometer, an atmospheric structure instrument, a gas chromatograph, a 
mass spectrometer, an aerosol collector pyrolzyer, a surface science 
package and a doppler wind experiment.  What can I say, we were loaded 
for bear, folks, with hot-blooded data as our target goal.
	Titan with its atmosphere of oxygen, nitrogen and complex 
molecules has always intrigued us as perhaps being a model of what 
primordial Earth might have been; the Huygens probe could have given us 
essential clues to how our planet might have evolved.  The probe's life 
would be atmospheric only; it's resting place will probably be at the 
bottom of an ocean of liquid methane.
	This kamikaze probe was named after the Dutch scientist Christian 
Huygens who discovered Titan in the middle sixteen hundreds; he was also 
the inventor of the pendulum based clock.  The ill-fated mothercraft, 
Cassini, was named after the French-Italian astronomer Jean-Dominique 
Cassini who discovered four of Saturn's other moons in the late sixteenth 
century: Dione, Iapetus, Rhea and Tethys.  Cassini also discovered the 
major split between the rings of Saturn, now known as the Cassini 
Division.  So much for history and fate.
	It's weird but even now I yearn for this data.  The flyby of the 
Saturn moon Enceladus might have yielded hints as to why it is so 
abnormally smooth, devoid of craters.  Iapetus, the yang and yin of 
Saturn's moons, has a highly reflective bright white side and a strangely 
too dark black side, with the division unaccountably distinct.  Why is 
this so?  Cassini would have fed our insatiable cravings for this 
knowledge.  Now we will never know.  The failure of the mission was such 
an insufferable blow to the whole scientific astronomic community.  
	The launch of the Cassini probe to Saturn was controversial at 
the onset.  By the time the launch date came around, an army of 
protesters surrounded Cape Canaveral, Florida.  Greenpeace, Amnesty 
International, all the biggies were there, protesting the use of 
plutonium for Cassini's electrical power source.  One poor soul even 
poured gasoline on himself and self-immolated (please, don't try this at 
home).  
	Hey, like I said, we've routinely utilized plutonium to power 
satellites in the past.  However it is true that seventy- two pounds was 
a record usage.  And now I wish, I wish to the almighty that we had 
descended from our ivory tower and really contemplated what those 
protesters were protesting about.  We just cavalierly dismissed their 
frenetic ravings, smugly assuming that they knew little about the 
important work we were accomplishing.  They were just crazies and weirdos 
to us, and ultimately the successful launch and Venus cruise portion of 
the mission justified our opinions, that is until the Earth swing-by in 
1999.
	Basically as far as we could tell the accident was precipitated 
by a software glitch.  Because of budgetary and time constraints, Ops 
decided that some procedural and instrument control software could be 
sent to Cassini while swinging by Earth and on its way to Jupiter.  Now 
believe me, we aren't total imbeciles.  Using an exact duplicate computer 
on Earth we debugged the hell out of every line of code, or so we 
thought.  I guess we have just got to realize that, as godlike as our 
capabilities are, we aren't.  In fact we are sometimes the biggest myopic 
dopes, spouting off about super strings, wormholes, heavy dark cold 
invisible matter and Higgs Bosons like they really exist, when in fact 
they most likely don't. 
	The truth is, we scientists are not mature enough to strive 
without ego.  We ignore the tough puzzles of space and time like Bell's 
theorem, the fact that photons act like a particle or a wave and that our 
own observation can actually affect an experiment, and we merrily go 
about our mundane and presumably concrete ways, pushing our pet theories 
upon the public like bragging, mendacious children, when we should really 
be screaming to the world that, hey, we live in a vaporous reality of 
trickery and deceit.  Watch out, as we don't have a clue as to what is 
really happening!
	Sorry, I'm getting a little off track here.  To continue: it 
wasn't exactly the software that caused poor Cassini to plunge towards 
Earth, it was the upload (still no excuses).  When Cassini approached 
Earth, because of the amount of autonomy built into its computer, it 
behaved like a spoiled child (we think).  When we proceeded to upload the 
software at high baud rates, the computer balked then rebooted, mid file. 
 The failsafes, solid state caches and redundant looping we provided the 
onboard computer with failed to prevent it from crashing.
	For some damn strange reason, after the cold reboot, the computer 
thought it was enroute to Jupiter, so it ordered Cassini to initiate the 
Deep Space Maneuver, resulting in the firing of its main engine, fueled 
by a bipropellant of mono-methyl-hydrazine and nitrogen tetraoxide.  The 
only problem was Cassini wasn't in deep space; it was in a nearby 
swing-by trajectory with the High Gain Antenna oriented directly towards 
Earth.  The High Gain Antenna was built in a fixed position, at the front 
or top of the spacecraft, so this required us to have to point the whole 
mess at Earth, to receive the high data rates of our software 
transmission upload as it swung by.  
	By the time we realized that something was perilously going 
wrong, it was too late.  Even the combination of the stabilizing 
thrusters and reaction wheels could not rotate the space vehicle 
expeditiously enough to reachieve at least an orbit around Earth. Instead 
it plummeted like a rocket propelled rock, hitting the atmosphere and 
burning up over the width of good ol' U.S.A., with some debris landing 
off the coast of California, consequently creating the biggest disaster 
since the great K/T boundary event occurred.  This was that huge meteor 
that impacted near the Yucatan peninsula, dug out the Chicxulub crater, 
covered the world in dust and annihilated the dinosaurs.  Our hope that 
the ceramic pellets of plutonium would break up into large uninhaleable 
chunks, vanished quickly, as unfortunately Cassini skipped a little when 
it hit our atmosphere, causing most of the craft to vaporize in a 
prolonged fiery reentry. 

	"And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from 
heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the 
rivers, and upon the fountains of waters.  And the name of the star was 
named Wormwood; and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and 
many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter." 
	Revelation, Chapter 8, Verses 10 & 11 

	The effect was instantaneous, "Nuke" riots raged in the cities 
world wide, suicide parties became trendy.  The pissed off public was 
determined to have swift retribution, so all top Nasa and JPL officials 
were promptly rounded up and shot.  It was either that or a complete 
stepping down of the specific governments.  The trust between governments 
and those that they had governed had ended forever, universally and 
bitterly.  In other words, happiness was basically off of everyone's 
agenda, permanently.  Luckily for me, I hadn't received the promotion I 
was expecting at NASA.  
	Funnily, the greatest irony of all isn't that the unfortunate 
Cassini reentry occurred just months before the turn of the millennium, 
(well maybe that too), but that the degraded plutonium used in Cassini's 
RTGs was bought as surplus from the Russians!  NASA didn't have enough 
plutonium to fuel Cassini so instead of using the aging breeder reactor 
at the Fast Flux Test Facility in Hanford to process more PU-238, they 
decided that it was far cheaper to buy it at the bargain rate of only 
$1.2 million per kilogram from the Soviets.  
	Imagine, a consortium of nations, U.S.A., France, Italy and other 
European nations, basically all of NATO, gathered together to spread 
(albeit accidentally) Russian plutonium all over the whole damn world, 
something during the cold war, we spent trillions and trillions of 
dollars and many lives trying to prevent.  Isn't hindsight a real hoot! 
	
	Of course air filtration became the watchword of the day.  
Overnight we became transformed into goggle-eyed and canister- breathing 
beings, costumed alien clowns dying on a deadly dying planet.  
Unfortunately in the end, filtration was basically a joke and underground 
survival shelters were simply dirt coffins. 
	Early on, the elaborate underground SAC bunkers in Washington 
D.C. and Colorado, jam-packed with frightened top military officials and 
elite rich, were rooted out, by the use of atomics (who cared by then?); 
the handiwork of the rogue armies of the now infamous Jefferies and 
Jamesion.  Their motto was, "If I'm going to die, you're sure as hell 
going to die too".
	And yet it wasn't specifically lung cancer that drove us to our 
graves, it was our daily appetite and thirst.  All food and water sources 
had become contaminated, so at first, governments around the world 
started to destroy all food crops and banned people from drinking the 
contaminated public waters, but quickly we found out that it was better 
to eat and drink radioactively contaminated food and water, then to 
suffer without.  So we ate and drank and then we died.  
	And we were worried about global warming.
	So the dust particles of plutonium isotopes rained down, and we 
died good, billions of decent, innocent people queued up to die at 
government euthanasia centers.  This insidious, invisible dust plague of 
death caused all sorts of internal cancers, lung cancer, skin cancer, 
cancer upon cancer, mutation upon mutation. We died horrible deaths; we 
died like sterile flies.
	Because my boss was head of Operations, I became head of Nasa Ops 
by attrition.  Out of the feelings of recompense, and honestly to keep 
NASA from becoming defunct and to keep me and my remaining colleagues 
alive, the first thing I did was to propose that we start a colony on the 
moon.  
	Surprisingly the public (what was left of it), fell in love with 
the idea.  It was portrayed as our only hope of keeping a pure genetic 
strain of humanity alive.  However, anyone with a little science 
background knew that a permanent moon colony would have to deal with 
enormous obstacles just to survive.  The real success of the project was 
that it brought the slimmest of hopes to fruition. 
	So the work began in earnest in the year 2003.  We expended every 
iota of the world's assets to complete this gargantuan project. China and 
Japan furnished electronics and chassis parts for the one-way space 
shuttles, Thailand and Malaysia the chemical fuels and propulsive 
systems, Australia contributed by creating and building moon shelters and 
precious semi-plutonium free food and water.  Every technologically 
capable nation sincerely contributed, as these motions proved to be a 
catharsis for our souls.  
	So the shuttles were built, shelters designed, and our pitiful 
exodus began, five grueling years of frantic labor, with the constant 
pressure of the possible inevitable extinction of our species gnawing on 
our consciousness.  But for once in the history of humankind, we, the 
proud people of this forsaken, resplendent planet, finally worked 
together in peace to achieve a common nonviolent goal (more irony for 
you).  This project became the symbolic salvation for a horribly 
destroyed, mutated planet, a planet devastated by the pomposity of us 
scientists.  Who could ever forgive us!  
	But forgive us the public did, never mind that we caused this 
catastrophic rain of death.  The promise of a moon colony free from the 
plutonium dust was enough to give some hope, (and us surviving scientists 
a reprieve, whew!).  That only seven hundred would be picked to inhabit 
the colony, and the fact that the colony had only one chance in a million 
in lasting fifty years did not deter the public from remaining enamored 
with the moon project. 
	It just goes to show the beauty and strength of our people, how 
hope can grow and persevere with the most paltry of chances of success.
	But now we scientists have failed again, the primary reactor core 
failed last month and is irreparable, and now our backup has taken a 
direct hit from a fist sized meteor.  With improvisation we may last five 
or six months.  Unfortunately we still lack the ability to produce 
machined parts, parts needed to rebuild at least one of the distillers; 
the shuttles from Earth ceased before they could deliver the furnaces and 
lathes needed.  Again another deadly miscalculation.  May God forgive us 
in the afterlife.  
	Perhaps in retrospect, God in his greatest wisdom is being 
merciful.  Because of the radiation, most of the equipment that was 
shuttled up to us is hot and useless anyway.  A generation would not even 
pass before the cancers and mutations start erupting again.  Maybe the 
deepest truth is to never fully trust your scientists.  After all, our 
job is to guess about things we don't know.
	So let this be a warning to possible future alien races who may 
visit our doomed planet in the future, control your scientists, err on 
the side of safety and surety, don't let the sanctity of knowledge 
dissuade you from making progress in a safe and sane manner.  The search 
for knowledge should not be a suicide mission for your whole race.  
Specifically, getting new data from Saturn was not worth destroying our 
home planet, believe me. 
	Of course, if some alien race does come upon our sterile world, 
years from now, and they realize what happened, I can't help wondering 
just how hard they will laugh at how insanely stupid we were, or maybe 
they'll just simply thank their own God, for providing them with a 
pristine vacant planet, perfect for procreating more of their own 
progeny.  May you cherish better what we squandered.  Strange how one's 
mind thinks at such times.

	And now we come full circle, the final blow delivered.  What was 
thought to be a slim but noble chance of survival on the surface of the 
moon, now concludes with a woeful but dramatic end.
	We called the asteroid string, the Willy-Jose asteroids, named 
after the two maintenance personnel who were doing some amateur star 
gazing forty hours ago.  Using the lunar base's telescope, they peered up 
at the deep dark lunar sky, and said, "Hey, what in the world is that?". 
 The asteroids looked like innocent specks of lights, a string of tiny 
brilliant pearls, headed for our settlement, bound for the deepest parts 
of our hearts.
	Once confirmed, we exiles knew we were in big trouble. Telemetry 
quickly confirmed that indeed these wandering pebbles in our lunar sky 
were coming directly for our colony.  Thanks to our Lidar doppler radar 
satellites encircling the moon, we knew to within half a hectare, where 
these diminutive rocks of providence would come down.  We just had no 
time or way to do a damn thing about it. 
	So early this morning the asteroids arrived, like the pale horses 
of the apocalypse, slamming indifferently into the lunar surface and our 
refuge, here a chunk, there a chunk, annihilating the last hopes of 
humankind forever.  
	With my wife by my side, surrounded by colleagues and friends, 
together we humbly and numbly viewed our fate from our fragile moon 
shelter, the moment immortalized by the beauty of our own destruction. 
	Fittingly, Earth has just begun to set upon the lunar horizon.  
The dust from the meteoric explosions has diffracted the sunlight, 
creating an unreal prismatic halo to form around the image of our 
precious Earth.  Inside me, feelings of great joy and grief well up and 
mix, fighting like old contentious friends.
	I wish I could just pluck you from the heavens that surround you, 
Mother Earth, and cradle you in my hands, treating you with the care, 
solace and attention that you beyond all deserve, nursing you back to 
health and happiness, washing all this badness away.  But sadly I have no 
such powers, and unluckily the wishing and praying ended a long time ago, 
with no miracles resolving.  
	So I say goodbye to you old girl, dear home planet we all loved, 
you gorgeous lapis lazuli goddess, cobalt orb of mother life; I'll never 
have the privilege again of stepping barefoot upon your green grasses, 
smelling your private scents, swimming in your sapphire seas, or enjoying 
your spectacular vistas anymore, but I thank you dearly, dearly for my 
cherished memories of you.
	Long may only the clearest and sweetest waters run over your 
venerable iron core.	
	Hopefully, one day, true sentient life will spring from your 
fertile, verdant loins.	Evidently, we were not worthy.



Copyright 1996, all rights reserved:  However you may copy this story and 
give it to a friend, but if you want to publish this story in any form 
you must attain my express permission.

Email at:  swi...@cci-internet.com

Please no spam or hate mail, this is just a short story, hope you enjoyed 
it!

A. H. Wakamatsu 



References 

HTTP//WWW.NASA.gov (Cassini)
Cassini Draft Environmental Impact Statement, NASA 10/20/94
Holy Bible
 

Your prose is flat, your imagry labored, your premise flawed.  I suggest a
creative writing class.

-- 


Bob
www.intermediatn.net/business/astrology
www.freeyellow.com/members/gustibus
de gustibus non est disputandum

fr