Out of This World    
     
   Little did Galileo, 17th century astronomer, suspect that someday, Jimmy Donut would know more than he did about Saturn's rings - which he discovered in 1610. 

   Stop me if you heard this already, but after five nervous months out of work, I was hired - yea! - by a Westinghouse subsidiary, itself under contract to the U.S. Department of Energy. 

   This was our primary facility for making the fissile material for nuclear bombs during the Cold War. Locals called it, "the bomb plant." Of course. 

   It was 1991, on a site with 25,000 employees spread over 300 square miles.

   Day 1: Our news magazine editor was on the other end of the line. "I want a story on the HB line," she said, as if I had a clue what that was. "Okay, sure," I answered. Gulp! 

   Somehow, I stumbled onto a guy who could coach me up. Here is the first paragraph of my first article:

     "Plutonium-238 oxide in 216 capsules will power three generators, without          which the Cassini orbiter and Saturn moon probe could not gather and              transmit information (back to Earth). Pu-238 oxide is lightweight, as hot as          the surface of a 100-watt light bulb and has a half-life of about 88 years." 

   The rest of the article got into the weeds of the HB line process. Thought this was just a bomb plant! 

   The $4 billion NASA mission, named for late astronomers Cassini and Huygens, launched in 1997 and orbited Saturn until 2017. Without Pu-238, there could be no mission. 

   Saturn is the second largest planet, basically hydrogen and helium gases, with eight rings of ice. The largest ring's circumference is greater than the distance from Earth to the moon, > 238 thousand miles. (Hmmmm...plutonium-238, and 238 thousand miles!)  

   NASA's probe traveled 792 million miles to Saturn, which is 95 times larger than Earth. And now, without the benefit of Pu-238, we transmit this data: Back tomorrow.

        Jimmy