If this keeps up, there may someday be a huge ring around Saturn.

I'd qualify that and say NASA decided not to spend (precious) fuel on "parking" it in a more stable orbit. But the trade-off would be either a shorter "active" mission or observations not as close to the planet.

Obviously getting the most science from the probe trumps other issues such as museum pieces for great great great grandchildren. I'd slap them myself if they shorted current science to "save" the probe for future museums.

Note that they sometimes decide on a "controlled" crash to reduce biological contamination risk to a planet or moon. But I don't think that's the case here.

Mariners went to Mars also. Thus, "direction" doesn't appear to be the criteria. I was just using a quick and dirty example anyhow.

they could have left it in an eternal orbit if they wanted too

I believe some reaction between the Sun and Mercury gradually degrades orbits of probes in the area. Being that close to the Sun makes the effect fairly large.

It may be true that if they had a bigger orbit it may have been able to stay in orbit a long time. But, scientists wanted to get closer to the planet for more detailed observations.

It's probably not a big concern anyhow because the probe would typically run out of instrument orientation fuel after a few years, unless you spend more to launch bigger tanks.

But, being Mercury is mostly a "dead" world, you are not going to see many new things after a couple of years in orbit such that "lingering" a good while may not be cost effective. If you were studying the atmosphere of say Venus or Jupiter, then lingering makes more sense because the weather patterns are always changing.

Correction: "future contracts"

They should simplify life and call it Voyager 3 or the like. That way we are not paying bureaucrats to concoct goofy acronyms that look like the Spail Chekker puked.

I realize that an aerospace contractor may have been the ones who dreamed it up, but they are still passing the cost of word-smithing on to the government indirectly because they expect to recover that salary through the income of future contacts.

They will declare such cells "corporations" to give them legal personhood

this has to go through a number of shipping venues, customs, the TSA and so on...

"Oh look, wavy tiramisu! They won't notice if I give some to my pals..."

a subset of the geek population that is quiet, thoughtful, polite, reasonably socially adept, extremely smart, and devoted to the mission over their own personal gain

All the orgs I've worked for filters most of those guys out.

How is that different from a cross-word puzzle?

Technical discussions always degenerated into dick waving arguments. They were more interested in getting *their* solution jammed through for a personal victory than the greater good. It was disgusting.

How is this different from any workplace loaded with geeks? "Tool X is has better flux capacity and washes dishes while juggling. You are using obsolete crap."

2/3 of the time they just want to use Tool X to get resume experience in it to move on to better-paying buzzword suckers, leaving their steaming experiment to others.

Good level-headed managers are needed to tame them and find compromises. Otherwise they'll rewrite the company's internal toilet paper tracking system in NodeJS using Hadoop on their brother-in-law's "cloud".

It's worth noting there's a school of educational research suggesting that introducing young children to high technology is actively bad

That's gotta be hogwash. Too much is probably bad, yes, but it's good to expose young kids to a wide variety of tools and techniques. I've seen studies that showed the wider the variety of toys young kids are exposed to, the better they later do in school.

And remember, bad software teaches patience.

Yeah, they are standing in line to visit the IT department. I believe the Clown Department would have more visitors. Clowns usually have people skills.

And in Big Bang, the audience is laughing their south ends off at how socially awkward the nerds are. Clowns can be popular, but that doesn't mean you'd PERSONALLY like to hang around clowns.

Like you know anything.