You were fine until you got to the "stupid" comment regardiing the impact hazard - I think I'll handle that one first, and then move on to Hyugens.

No one knows with any certainty what the impact rate of both asteorids and comets is. For the last 5,000 years or so, it has been anywhere from 1 to 2 orders of magnitude greater than the numbers NASA management trots out. NASA management continues to trot out these impact "guesimates" even though they have been thoroughly demonstrated to be faulty. See their author Shoemaker's own comments on them as an earlier post below here at HZ.

Instead of doing what's right, NASA management would rather give their funds to their existing clients, public safety be damned. It's all fine to know about Titan, but let mankind go the way of the dinosaur, and that knowledge will be valueless.

The true value of Cassini and Hyugens will be in their data helping to define the impact hazard, but that's only if the money is made available to analyze that data.

By the way, as it sits right now it is also impossible to even get a whiff of accuracy in dating an "geological" structure on any planet.

Moving on to Hyugens, I doubt if you can give all the instrument results equal weight. A lot of the other results will also be impacted by the loss of data from the imagery set. So add in those amounts to your $83 million, as a fraction of the $417 million, the other 5/6ths. In particular, the lack of detailed spectra of individual features affects all of it.

In addition, you have to add in the costs of "recontructing" the lost data.

Add in about $1-2 million for the investigation into the loss of data.

Finally, add in the costs of all the bs that's going to be fabricated, where if the imagery had come down whole these questions would have been answered with certainty.

Now how would you spend say $120 million dollars?

ep