August 7, 2008

Another Gem From The Examiner

Surf's Up---On Saturn's Moon Titan, Cassini Mission Reveals, Examiner

"On December 24, 2004, Cassini sent the Huygens probe down to Titan's surface. The probe arrived safely on Jan. 15,2005. Since then the two craft have been shipping exploration information back home via three microwave antennas."

Editor's note: Huygens only operated for a matter of hours on the surface of Titan after landing. All of the data it collected has long been sent back to Earth. Therefore it cannot still be "shipping" anything back home.

Editor's update: What a coincidence - they corrected the story after I posted my note. Here is a cached version of the original article.


Posted by kcowing at August 7, 2008 8:36 PM
Comments

Maybe they saw your comment and changed it. It now reads "Since then the team of instruments on the Cassini spacecraft has been shipping exploration information back home" which is correct.

Editor's note: What a coincidence ;-) Here is a cached version of the original article.

Posted by: Eric Fielding at August 7, 2008 9:30 PM

"Huygens only operated for a matter of hours on the surface of Titan after landing."

Yes, this is technically correct, but isn't it much more romantic to think that a small probe sent by a few humans could be sailing the seas of Titan, exploring the edge of our solar system?

Posted by: Werner at August 7, 2008 9:44 PM

Actually, the change is fully annotated on my story, in my comment, with credit to Keith for catching a failure to add the word "Cassini" where I should have. However, he failed to catch the horrible, awful, grammatical construction I had in there--so I fixed that too while I was in there. That's annotated, too.

I am making the generous assumption that Keith has never, ever, had one single error, not even a typo, not even a mis-spelling, not even a poorly-constructed sentence, on anything he's ever posted. Ne-vah! Let alone, shall we say, attacks based on failures of fact, as with my Obama story. Keith, not everyone loves your man. Sorry. Although I was initially very impressed with him. But his flip flopping, and various other things, including the tendency of his supporters to savage non-believers, kinda turned me off a few months ago.


Editor's note: Pointless, off topic, ad hominem attacks edited out. Yes, I am such a horrible person because you found one other person out there on the internet to agree with you.

To the issue of your article: Nice try - pretend that it once said something else - but this is what it said "On December 24, 2004, Cassini sent the Huygens probe down to Titan's surface. The probe arrived safely on Jan. 15,2005. Since then the two craft have been shipping exploration information back home via three microwave antennas."

You wrote the TWO craft i.e. Cassini and Huygens (or is there some other spacecraft you are referring to?)

You can see your earlier version here (i.e "two craft") in cached form.

I have saved PDF versions of this once Google revises its cached version.

Posted by: Patricia Phillips at August 7, 2008 9:57 PM

Dear Ms. Phillips:

Truth? You can't handle the truth!!!

The JPL Link to the information you did not read,
nor research is right on 'The Examiner' page with your story.

Why not visit the site first and read about the mission of any other space missions or related articles you decide to write?

And... Switch to Decaf, you feel more calm.

Whew!

Posted by: Galen at August 8, 2008 5:11 AM
Post a comment









Remember personal info?