Carl Sagan tried to convince scientists that a camera wouldn't do important science. He lost the battle, but he won the war because all future missions thankfully carried cameras. "What is an imaging device except a bunch of detectors? In fact, in the case of Cassini, a million individual detectors arrayed in two dimensions?" Voyager project scientist Ed Stone told him no, we're not going to take an image like this unless you can find some science to it. But what they couldn't see was the utility in imaging data.
How much has space imaging furthered our understanding of the Universe? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Chuck Nice learn the story of cameras on space probes like Voyager and Cassini and the exciting science of Saturn with planetary scientist Carolyn Porco.
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Photo Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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