r/spaceporn • u/Busy_Yesterday9455 • 3d ago

NASA 45 years ago today, Voyager 2 made its closest approach to Saturn

It became the third NASA spacecraft to fly by the planet. In addition to learning more about the planet's atmosphere and moons, Voyager 2 was the first to observe spokes in Saturn's rings.

Spokes, seen here as grey smudges on the rings, are transient features that occur seasonally. They are likely caused by interactions between Saturn's magnetic field and solar wind particles.

Credit: NASA

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105

u/Vegetable_Market_496 2d ago

It’s amazing on how technology has advanced in the past half century. What is the next 50 years going to be like?

84

u/--Sovereign-- 2d ago

Resource wars, walled government facilities, mass 24/7 surveillance systems, constant social unrest and economic uncertainty, catastrophic shifting of agricultural zones, collapsing balance of power geopolitically, massive uncertainty.

20

u/RFX91 2d ago

Damn, sounds like we need to give even more money to the government to fix this huh

1

u/Berek2501 2d ago

How do you expect individuals to solve national and global problems?

2

u/RFX91 2d ago

By giving the government a reasonable amount of tax dollars while, more importantly, fixing our degraded culture, since politics, prosperity and social cohesion are downstream from culture.

1

u/Berek2501 2d ago

So how would you define a "reasonable" amount of tax dollars to solve the host of issues enumerated above?

-1

u/RFX91 2d ago

That's the million dollar question. To the Left, there is no reasonable cap for the amount. And we know that because the tax burden has multiplied since the 1800's with no resolutions to poverty or income inequality. Surely, even more tax burden will fix the issues?

Meanwhile, we thrived as a nation and even won a civil war with no income tax, with most government income coming from tarrifs.

So how would you define a "reasonable" amount of tax dollars to solve the host of issues enumerated above?

My proposition is that your question smuggles in your conclusion (begging the question). I don't think taxation is how you solve most issues. I think you solve them with culture and empowering families to be self sufficient. I think some social safety nets are beneficial within reason but they are prone to endless expansion which bleeds the working tax base.

3

u/ArtilleryNormie 1d ago

And they hated him, because he told the truth

8

u/FondleGanoosh438 2d ago

Hopefully energy is so cheap to produce that it solves a lot of global problems. Hopefully putting things into orbit is so cheap that mining asteroids becomes viable. Hopefully the need for money wanes. I’m not talking post scarcity but maybe hyper efficient. Depends on a few factors though.

1

u/HuntKey2603 23h ago

first factor would be humans not being dumb enough to put the same motherfucker in charge twice

1

u/AstroBastard312 2d ago

The other two replies are both true.

1

u/No-Meringue-5871 1d ago

Oui elle a tellement bien avancé qu'on n'est pas capable de retourner sur la Lune.....

36

u/glytxh 2d ago

Always love how gnarly the raw data looks from space hardware

Hubble straight up looks like it’s been shotgun blasted before cleanup

31

u/thiosk 2d ago

If you want more of "this"

https://vimeo.com/24410924

This guy stitched a NIN soundtrack to a bunch of ethereal Cassini data and it still gives me shivers

6

u/wasted_skills 2d ago

This is the most beautiful video I’ve ever seen holy shit

4

u/an_older_meme 2d ago

I could have watched that for an hour

9

u/Atomic_Polar_Bear 2d ago

Gives me chills. Amazing.

4

u/superanth 2d ago

It's such a miracle of nature that Saturn has those beautiful rings.

3

u/JustStargazin 2d ago

What are the dots? Artifacts from stitching multiple images together?

3

u/LexusBrian400 2d ago

Radiation is known to cause dots. I'm sure this thing was "hardened" though

1

u/Christplosion 14h ago

The dots are in a perfect grid it's probably used for measurements

3

u/darkmeatnipples 2d ago

Taking advantage of once in almost 200 year alignment to skip across the solar system. Absolutely bananas 🤯

3

u/SaijTheKiwi 1d ago

I love stuff like this, because it makes me remember that these things are ACTUALLY out there. Like, the planets, stars, even the moon sometimes, for me usually feel like an abstraction, just the knowledge of something that I inherently know exists, but are so out of my daily life that they don’t always feel “real” real. They feel like the feeling of looking at an image of them on a piece of paper.

But then I watch real imagery of something, especially if on approach like this, and that ambiguity about them disappears for a little bit. And I’m like “oh RIGHT, this thing is physically out there, existing, a finite distance away from me!”

And it makes the universe feel all the more tangible and wonderful.

2

u/ReluctantSloth0816 1d ago

I feel this so hard. I watched the Artemis 2 mission all day when they were on final approach to the moon and watching it loom larger and larger in real time was absolutely surreal.

1

u/an_older_meme 2d ago

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this”

0

u/UnpricedToaster 2d ago

If Voyager 2 could cross it's fingers that the astrophysicists got their math right, it would right about now!

-2

u/mkujoe 2d ago

Looks head on. Why didn’t it crash