How Weird Is This?

I read quite a lot of Arthur C. Clarke's science fiction back in the day. My least favorite was 2001: A Space Odyssey. I suspect that is because while I enjoyed The Sentinel upon which the story is loosely based, 2001 was actually kind of a joint project between Clarke and Stanley Kubrick - who I really never liked at all. (Yeah, yeah, that will offend some people. I thought most of his films were boring. At best. Some were among the worst things ever filmed, giving Plan 9 From Outer Space a real run.) Here's the weird thing, though.

The Cassini probe was making a flyby of the moon of Saturn that is the endpoint of the journey in 2001. Called Japetus in the book but actually named Iapetus, that was supposed to be the location of the monolith with extraordinary powers. So what, you ask?

So the moon apparently zapped the Cassini probe and put it into safe mode.

Cassini flew within 1,000 miles of Iapetus on Monday and snapped images of its rugged, two-toned surface. As it was sending data back to Earth, it was hit by a cosmic ray that caused a power switch to trip. The spacecraft was not damaged, but had to turn off its instruments and relay only limited information.

Mission controllers have since sent commands for Cassini to resume normal transmission and scientists recovered all the data from the moon flyby despite a nearly 12-hour delay. The spacecraft was expected to be fully functional by week's end.

Iapetus, Saturn's third-largest moon, gained science fiction fame in Clarke's mind-bending novel "2001: A Space Odyssey," that was developed in concert with Stanley Kubrick's 1968 movie by the same name.

Clarke surprised the Cassini team with a five-minute video played Tuesday during an internal meeting at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Clarke, who lives in Sri Lanka, told scientists he looked forward to viewing photos from the flyby.

Even before Clarke's taped greeting, scientists waxed poetic about Cassini's encounter with Iapetus and the fictional Discovery spaceship's rendezvous with Japetus, as the Saturn moon is known in Clarke's book.

"From time to time, you would hear references to the novel. People would say, 'I wonder if Cassini will see the monolith,'" said Cassini program manager Robert Mitchell.

Well of course it won't. The aliens who zapped the probe have already switched the tapes.