THE CASSINI MISSION

The Cassini mission is a joint project between the National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) and the European Space Agency (ESA).   It's overall mission objective is to explore the Saturnian system with its array of sensory equipment.  What makes this mission more controversial and important than previous missions, is the Cassini power supply and the fact that it will slingshot around the Earth at approximately 35,000 mph only 312 miles above our heads. 

The devices used to give power to all of Cassini's instruments are called Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTG's).  For the first time ever, a deep space probe will use 3 of these RTG's carrying an incredible 72.3 pounds of plutonium as fuel.  The RTG's will produce approximately 750 watts from the heat of this decaying plutonium.  No other probe has ever come close to containing this much nuclear material.

To put this kind of fuel in perspective, Dr Helen Caldicott (founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility) stated:

"It is so toxic that less than 1 millionth of a gram (an invisible particle) is a carcinogenic dose.  One pound, if uniformly distributed, could hypothetically induce lung cancer in every person on Earth."

This small probe will travel approximately 3.1 billion miles over an 11 year period and be powered (not propelled) by 72.3 pounds of plutonium.  It only takes 5 pounds of nuclear fuel to power an aircraft carrier for 5 years.  Only 3 pounds caused the Chernobyl disaster.  So really, why so much nuclear fuel for such a small probe?

NASA claims that solar power couldn't work on this kind of mission because it would be too far away from the sun to obtain sufficient energy.   However NASA had also claimed that the Galileo mission (which used an RTG) also had no other alternative than nuclear power.  Amazingly enough, through the Freedom Of Information Act, only weeks after the Galileo launch, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) was forced to release a study that specifically stated that the Galileo mission could indeed have been carried out using solar power

"without changing the mission sequence or impacting science objectives". 

NASA lied in Federal Court about the necessity for plutonium as the Florida Coalition for Peace & Justice sought an injunction to stop the Galileo mission.  So why is nuclear power so important that NASA would lie in Federal Court?

In 1995 a physicist at the ESA named Carla Signorini stated

"If given the money to do the work, within 5 years [ESA] could have solar cells ready to power a space mission to Saturn."

Its now been almost 5 years and NASA / ESA are still using nuclear fuel on deep space missions.  The obvious reason for this is that the budgets allocated to solar power systems have been but a grain of sand from the huge bucket in which nuclear research is funded.  Great solar power technology is not readily available because the research and development budgets were never sufficient to produce the technology.

This Cassini mission will indirectly aid the development and public awareness / acceptance of the nuclear weaponization of space.  The US Space Command is already planning for control and use of a variety of future nuclear weapons and power sources in space.  Lt. Gen. James Abrahamson, former head of the Strategic Defence Initiative Organization stated

"Failure to develop nuclear power in space could cripple efforts to deploy anti-missile sensors and weapons in orbit."

So NASA is putting all of its energy into creating nuclear power sources instead of solar power or other alternatives complying with the wishes of government and military interests.  Now the last time I checked, NASA was a civilian agency funded with the peoples tax dollars.  It's quite clear that the public masses don't want nuclear time bombs either on the ground or above their heads! And NASA isn't listening they are deceiving!

Most of the information below comes from "Accident Risks from the Cassini Space Mission" by Dr. Michio Kaku.  Dr Kaku is the Henry Semat professor of theoretical physics at the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York.  He is one of the world's leading authorities on Einstein's Unified Field Theory and co-founder of String Theory.  He has published 9 books and 70 articles in the scientific literature. 

In NASA's Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) they give estimates of figures and percentages of possibilities on a variety of accident scenerios.   The FEIS continually underestimates the possible risks of an accident occurring with the Cassini mission.  All figures are shown to 3 significant digits making it look as though serious accurate calculations have been performed, when in reality, no full-scale test of any realistic accident scenario has ever been carried out.   It is OK to make estimates in scientific papers like the FEIS, but it is also standard procedure to give error bars or estimates of uncertainty along side such estimates.  No such uncertainties exist in the FEIS.  It appears that all NASA's facts and figures are correct and should be trusted not questioned.  In fact the FEIS numbers are all educated guesses not real experimental numbers and therefore rates of uncertainty cannot be calculated.

A key flaw in the FEIS statements and calculations is that they are all modelled on single event failures.  They have modelled high temperatures, shrapnel, over-pressure but not all 3 at once.  The RTG structure begins downgrading at approximately 1000 degrees C and begins melting at 2425 degrees C.  Aluminium bullets fired at 1820 ft/sec and titanium bullets fired at 1387 ft/sec have caused a breach of containment at room temperature.  Chemical explosions can cause over pressure of serveral thousand pounds per square inch.  The RTG's were tested to 2210 lb/ft ^2 without fuel release.  However in the real world these scenarios don't happen singularly.  A realistic event would be the high temperatures weakening the RTG structure allowing shrapnel and explosive over-pressure to burst the RTG wide open!   Without any kind of real-world scenario test, NASA confidently states (without any error bars of uncertainty) that the percentage of plutonium that could escape during a launch phase accident is less than 0.01%.

In one particular scenario, the FEIS states that the area the plutonium would be scattered if an accident occurred would be approximately a 1000 ft square area (the plutonium would be confined to the launch pad).  This calculation doesn't even take the effects of wind into consideration!  On 21-APR-1964, the Pentagon's SNAP-9A nuclear device disintegrated in our atmosphere releasing 2.1 pounds of plutonium into the air.  This plutonium was blown over the entire Earth giving everyone on the planet a small piece of the SNAP-9A satellite into their system.   The radiation from Chernobyl was also widely tracked over Europe and the US.   But NASA tells us that at their launch pad, the wind stops blowing!

When so many components go into creating something like the Cassini deep space probe, the strength of the whole mission will depend on its weakest link.  In this case the weakest link is the Titan IV booster rocket.  On 02-AUG-1993 the Titan IV rocket was responsible for exploding over the Pacific Ocean destroying its $1 billion US spy satellite system.  This rocket has a failure rate of approximately 1 in 20.  Booster rockets in general have a failure rate of approximately 1 in 70.  NASA's FEIS commonly has accident probabilities of 1 in 1 million.  This 1 in 1 million figure is largely created from the probability of an impact from a micrometeorite.  Once this probability is removed from the equation to leave error probabilities from transmission, component malfunction, human error etc (which computers can't calculate) it's naturally expected that the 1 in 1 million figure would drop dramatically!

So now that we have survived the Cassini deep space probe, it's only a matter of time before something more catastrophic than the previous disasters will occur.  We voluntarily put ourselves at risk every day of our lives, but when NASA bureaucrats are the ones endangering our safety without sufficient accurate warnings of potential accidents, or public acceptance, it becomes dishonesty.