That's interesting. I always thought it was a small nuclear reactor onboard.
I don't see why the press/public would freak out to know that nuclear power is being used on a space probe 9 billion miles away.
I don't see why the press/public would freak out to know that nuclear power is being used on a space probe 9 billion miles away.
Even after it leaves orbit, the probes loop back to use the Earth for gravitational assist and there's a minuscule chance that it will crash; with odds something like 1:1000000. In the absolute let's-imagine-the-impossible worst case scenario, an additional few thousand people are expected to get cancer.
Summarize that as "but if it crashes into the Earth, thousands of people will die!"
In that case, the media would spend all their time talking about how many billions of becquerels of plutonium got released into the ocean (or atmosphere, or wherever), not having any directly-attributable deaths to point to or any other large measurements to use.
[1] http://motherjones.com/politics/1997/09/cassini-controversy