On This Day

                              Image Credit: NASA

October 15: I woke up having completed 18,250 orbits of our sun. Yowza. No wonder I'm so tired.

One of the first things I learned today (thanks to an email from NASA) was that the Cassini spacecraft launched on my birthday, Oct. 15, in 1997. Nice of NASA to light such a big candle for me. ;)

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. The photo above was taken from Hangar AF on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, with a solid rocket booster retrieval ship in the foreground. It took Cassini seven years to reach Saturn, a 2.2 billion mile journey.

NASA controllers were pretty happy when Cassini reached orbit around the ringed planet on June 30, 2004.

Cassini's primary mission was four years, but the craft has certainly been a workhorse since completing that in 2008. Good ol' Cassini is still plugging along, getting things done. In fact, just yesterday, Cassini was closing in on Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn's.

             Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

While Cassini didn't spot any Saturnian Santa on Enceladus' North Pole, the craft did capture this photo of a "snowman" (actually a tight trio of craters), as it approached the icy moon Enceladus on an Oct. 14, 2015, flyby.

                                    Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
On Oct. 28, Enceladus will come within 30 miles (49 kilometers) of Enceladus' south polar region, passing through the moon's plume of icy spray. While doing so, it will sample the chemistry of the extraterrestrial ocean beneath the ice. We can't wait to read about those results!

Mission scientists hope the data will provide more insights about the ocean's chemistry, and evidence of how much hydrothermal activity is occurring in the moon's ocean.

NASA has an online toolkit for all three final Enceladus flybys, available here: 
http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/finalflybys, and there's lots more Cassini info on the mission's Web site: http://www.nasa.gov/cassini


GOING NOVA: Last night we had the great fortune of happening to tune into a NOVA episode just as it was beginning. The topic: "Cyberwar Threat."

Per the PBS Web site about the show, the episode "examines the science and technology behind cyber warfare and asks if we are already in the midst of a deadly new arms race."


Here's Annabelle's review ...

"CyberWar Threat" is an episode of the Nova TV series. "CyberWar Threat" was about how hackers and even entire nations can launch attack or wage wars, all using computers. One of the ways a hacker could damage a city is by hacking into a generator’s computer and making it “jump” by controlling the spark plugs. Hackers can also use your passwords if you went to an internet cafe and used their internet to manage anything like e-mail, where you need to sign in. They don’t do this by watching over your shoulder- they can use a program to track your keystrokes. On a larger scale, Sony pictures was blackmailed through hacking by a country we can only assume is North Korea, threatening to launch a cyber war if they released their movie, “The Interview”. Stuxnet is an infamous hack, because it’s very sneaky and could take down entire pipelines. Hacking could wage wars, so we need to be alert. Virus-blocking software already exists, but you can get malware so many ways it’s hard to cover all the bases.

And CJ has this to say about it ...

On October 14th, 2015, we watched a special PBS documentary called "CyberWar Threat", an episode of PBS's "Nova" series.

"CyberWar Threat" is a documentary about how recently, the internet has become dangerously like a battleground for waging warfare, and that all sorts of dangerous things can be done by expert hackers. For example, there was an experiment in 2007 known as "Project Aurora", which was a test to see how quickly hackers could knock out a major electric power generator. They made the generator "jump" multiple times, pausing between jumps, and eventually broke it. Something like this could be done in less than a minute by professional hackers, and could cause a blackout in an area for weeks.

This is not the only disturbing thing shown in "CyberWar Threat", and you can watch it on PBS' website.