Evan Short 247.155

Cassini's last words In the past week a great tool of space science shared it's final contributions with earth before plummeting to it's demise. The great tool in question was the Cassini spacecraft which had orbited Saturn since 2004 and had also delivered the Huygens probe to the surface of one of Saturn's moons, Titan. After thirteen years of relaying data and images of Saturn and it's moons the craft took a few lower altitude orbits before finally crashing itself into Saturn itself. The decision to destroy the craft was to protect many of the planet's many moon environments (thought to possibly be habitable) from biological contamination. In the beginning Work on the Cassini mission began in 1982 with the European Science Foundation (ESA) and the American National Academy of Sciences looking at possible collaborative efforts which eventuated in a NASA and ESA shared mission to send a probe (Huygens) to Titan and an orbiter craft (Cassini) to collect...

Two's company, three's a team Around two months ago after a few brief and flailing attempts at forming a remote report team on the Stream forum I finally was able to connect with four other people who became the report team I work with. Sadly, within the first week one of our members went silent and seemed to slip off the face of the earth and then another member left, albeit this time with communication, around two weeks ago. Thankfully the remaining two members and myself have been working well together, getting through the initial tasks of setting up a basic team structure and beginning our survey. There are advantages and disadvantages to remote teams Having recently worked in a small but effective IT team, where on occasion members would work from home, I understand the benefits of having the flexibility to work remotely but also the pitfalls and hindrances that can arise when members are not physically present in the office. One benefit can be the ability to focus on...