Cassini Mission Nears Saturn

By Joe Katzman on June 13, 2004 7:00 AM | 3 Comments

Reader Mike Daley notes that NASA's Cassini-Huygens mission, launched back in 1997, is now less than 2 weeks away from Saturn. It will spend the next 4 years studying Saturn's rings and moons.

Cassini-Huygens is an international collaboration between 3 space agencies and 17 nations. Here's NASA JPL's backgroud site for the mission, a CNN interactive story that describes why the mission was/is controversial, and some technical details (and a further update) from spaceblogger Jay Manifold.

So why is this important? for one thing, Saturn's rings have puzzled scientists for a long time. In addition, we know that Saturn's moon Titan has its own atmosphere. Some even believe that life could be possible there, and the Huygens probe will be landing on Titan to tell us more. Stay tuned.

3 Comments

#1 from Glenn | June 14, 2004 2:27 PM | Reply

It's great to see everyone writing more about science on Winds of Change. I like it a lot!

#2 from Jay Manifold | June 14, 2004 3:56 PM | Reply

Joe, many thanks for the link. Couple more technical tidbits which I hope to blog in greater detail soon:

While calculating the brightness of Saturn and its larger moons as seen from Phoebe, it occurred to me that Phoebe itself would not be naked-eye visible from a spacecraft in close orbit around Saturn -- it's dark enough that you'd need binoculars to find it!

An existing but very low-res map of Phoebe, based on the much more distant Voyager 2 flyby, will have to be extensively revised. This raises an interesting question -- how will longitudes on Phoebe be determined? Unlike Saturn's other moons, it is not tidally locked; it rotates in just over 9 hours, and therefore lacks a "sub-Saturnian" longitude, from which Saturn always appears on the meridian -- a permanent noon, as it were. This is the basis for longitude 0° on other moons.
I'm in touch with asteroid mapper Phil Stooke about this and hope to have an answer shortly.

#3 from Jay Manifold | June 14, 2004 7:53 PM | Reply

The promised update is now available here. Enjoy!

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Cassini Mission Nears Saturn

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