On too many days, our world seems to be nothing but bad stuff. COVID-19 pandemic death and illness and disruption … the war in Ukraine and the Middle East … mass killing of innocents getting their groceries, going to school, worshipping their God … inflation. How can you not be bummed out?
And then I watch a documentary on Netflix’s “7 Days Out” series about NASA’s Cassini space mission to Saturn. What a wonderful and incredible testimony to the real-world potential of humankind. It lifted my spirit. Maybe it will lift yours too.
For the technophiles among us, Cassini spent 13 years orbiting Saturn after a 7-year trip from Earth.
It far exceeded its expected life. The damned thing worked for 20 years, doing what it was designed to do, and then some.
It did so in a hostile and unforgiving environment at a mind boggling 900 million miles from our Earth. That’s almost 10 times the distance between us and the Sun. Send a command to Cassini and it gets there over an hour later. And another hour after that, you get a message from Cassini telling you it received and executed your command … or didn’t. You talk to Cassini at a very pedestrian data rate of no more than 250 thousand bits per second. (My iPhone just talked to the internet at 49 million bits per second.)
It showcases in very human terms the exemplary expertise, passion, commitment, and teamwork of, as best I can tell, over a thousand people working for several decades.
I highly recommend 7 Days Out. It shows the behind-the-scenes for the week proceeding an eclectic set of events ranging from the Westminster Dog Show … to a Chanel Haute Couture show in Paris … to Cassini.
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