September 15, 2017

Goodnight, Cassini

While Kevin’s on vacation, we’ve invited other Mother Jones writers to contribute posts.

Early Friday morning, the Cassini spacecraft ended its 20-year-long journey as it burned up in Saturn’s atmosphere. 

Cassini spent seven years in transit (space travel ain’t quick), followed by 13 years orbiting Saturn and collecting data from the solar system’s second largest planet and its moons. Over the course of its run, Cassini sent back countless breathtaking images.

For folks my age (I’m 31), it’s easy to forgot just how new and perception-altering it is to have pictures of other planets in the solar system. Humans didn’t have pictures of our neighbors in the far reaches of the solar system until Voyager 1 and 2 launched in 1977. That’s a major shift in how we view the solar system, our galaxy, and the universe! Thanks to missions like Cassini, people now grow up not just imagining what other planets might look like, but actually getting to explore Saturn’s rings and other wonders from space.

Here’s a brief sampling of images we have thanks to Cassini’s journey.

A view of Saturn released in 2005.

A storm in Saturn’s atmosphere in 2011.

Saturn’s rings, photo from 2009.

Photo of Saturn from 2013.

Cassini’s “holiday greetings” message to Earth, on December 24, 2004.

An image of Jupiter from 2003.

An image of Saturn from 2004.

(All pictures via NASA. There are plenty of more amazing photos in their database—both from Cassini and other missions—so take a break from depressing Trump news to enjoy the beauty of the universe.)

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And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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