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Articles: NASA's Cassini Probe Poised to Sling Around Saturn

Posted by admin on Wednesday, June 30, 2004 - 12:08 AM

NASA (news - web sites)'s Cassini probe neared its rendezvous with Saturn on Wednesday morning to become the first spacecraft to orbit the ringed planet and its 31 icy moons.
The truck-sized probe has spent the seven years since its 1997 launch from Cape Canaveral on a circuitous 2.2 billion-mile interplanetary journey designed to slingshot around Earth and Venus and Jupiter to the solar system's outer reaches and Saturn, the sixth planet from the Sun. Cassini and its piggy-backed lander, Huygens, make the closest approach to Saturn of its 11-year mission on Wednesday at about 6 p.m. PDT when it begins a crucial maneuver scientists call Saturn orbit insertion. Scientists will first turn the probe's dish-shaped antenna to face forward in a "protective attitude" designed to shield it from impact from the mostly dust-sized particles that make up Saturn's rings. After Cassini's 90-minute, 98,500-mile flight through the ring plane, the spacecraft will fire its main engine for 96 minutes to slow itself and allow Saturn's gravity field to capture it. As it passes through a gap in Saturn's F and G rings, Cassini may lose contact with scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, but communication and telemetry should be restored about a half hour after it begins orbiting at 8:54 p.m. PDT. Cassini flies closest to Saturn during the first of its 76 planned orbits. It will come within 49,850 miles of the planet's center and about a quarter of that distance from its cloud tops. Described as the world's most scientifically capable space probe, Cassini will spend four years studying Saturn, its rings and its 31 known moons. NASA, the European Space Agency, the Agenzia Spaziale Italiana and scientists from 17 European nations began building Cassini-Huygens in 1995, although planning began in the 1980s. Huygens, named for 17th century Dutch scientist Christian Huygens, who discovered Saturn's rings, sets off for Titan on Christmas Eve (news - web sites) to observe the moon's methane-rich atmosphere and search for complex organic molecules on its surface. Cassini is expected to send back the first data and images from its close encounter with Saturn on Thursday morning.

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