Friday’s Unscientific Poll: Most Useless London Underground Station

(New Circle members: The Unscientific Poll is a semi-regular feature of this journal on Fridays. Topics vary wildly, although food is the most common one.)

Poll #18243 Most Useless London Underground Station

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 15

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Complete this sentence: Pimlico is the most useless London Underground station

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on the Victoria Line.
6 (54.5%)

in Zone 1.
3 (27.3%)

on the entire Tube network.
2 (18.2%)

If Pimlico is not the most useless London Underground station on the entire Tube network, what is?

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( Context )

ETA at 10:19 AM: *KLAXON* MORNINGTON CRESCENT HAS BEEN MENTIONED ALREADY. That took even less time than I thought it would. *hands a banana to miss_s_b*

Cassini’s last Titan flyby

As many of you know, I work on the Cassini mission as an operations engineer and have done for over a decade.

Tomorrow is the spacecraft’s final close flyby (T126) of Saturn’s moon Titan.

Just to put this into perspective for you, this may be the last time in decades that we get anywhere near Titan. There are no missions to Saturn or its most interesting* moons, Titan and Enceladus, currently funded or being built. That means there’s a minimum of ten years before a new mission could be launched. Given that the transit time to Saturn is, at a minimum, seven years and on average more like ten, that’s two decades until we can repeat Cassini’s observations.

Cassini’s impending demise makes me sad, of course, but what bothers me even more is the lack of continuity in our exploration of our solar system.

You can read the details of tomorrow’s Cassini’s observations on the NASA-JPL press release here. It includes an animation of the flyby over the surface, from the perspective of the spacecraft.

* “most interesting” being ever so slightly subjective, of course