Cassini spacecraft nearing Saturn

This should end the often heated debate among scientists as to whether or not Saturn would make a nice vacation spot.

To myself, the moons of Saturn and Jupitor are more interesting than the planets.

I've been trying to follow this story.... thanks for the reminder, edgar!

Cassini Pictures Show Majesty of Saturn's Rings
PASADENA, Calif., July 1 (AScribe Newswire) -- The first pictures taken by the Cassini spacecraft after it began orbiting Saturn show breathtaking detail of Saturn's rings, and other science measurements reveal that Saturn's magnetic field pulsed in size as Cassini approached the planet.

"For years, we've dreamed about getting pictures like this. After all the planning, waiting and worrying, just seeing these first images makes it all worthwhile," said Dr. Charles Elachi, Cassini radar team leader and director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "We're eager to share these new views and the exciting discoveries ahead with people around the world."

The narrow angle camera on Cassini took 61 images soon after the main engine burn that put Cassini into orbit on Wednesday night. The spacecraft was hurtling at 15 kilometers per second (about 34,000 miles per hour), so only pieces of the rings were targeted.

"We won't see the whole puzzle, only pieces, but what we are seeing is dramatic," said Dr. Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team leader, Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo. "The images are mind-boggling, just mind-boggling. I've been working on this mission for 14 years and I shouldn't be surprised, but it is remarkable how startling it is to see these images for the first time."

Some images show patterned density waves in the rings, resembling stripes of varying width. Another shows a ring's scalloped edge. "We do not see individual particles but a collection of particles, like a traffic jam on a highway," Porco said. "We see a bunch of particles together, then it clears up, then there's traffic again."

Other instruments on Cassini besides the camera have also been busy collecting data. The magnetospheric imaging instrument took the first image of Saturn's magnetosphere. "With Voyager we inferred what it looked like, in the same way that a blind man feels an elephant. Now we can see the elephant," said Dr. Tom Krimigis of Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md., principal investigator for the magnetospheric imaging instrument. The magnetosphere is a bubble of energetic particles around the planet shaped by Saturn's magnetic field and surrounded by the solar wind of particles speeding outward from the Sun.

"During approach to Saturn, Cassini was greeted at the gate," said Dr. Bill Kurth, deputy principal investigator for the radio and plasma wave science instrument onboard Cassini. "The bow shock where the solar wind piles into the planet's magnetosphere was encountered earlier than expected. It was as if Saturn's county line had been redrawn, and that was a surprise." Cassini first crossed the bow shock about 3 million kilometers (1.9 million miles) from Saturn, which is about 50 percent farther from the planet than had been detected by the Pioneer, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft that flew past Saturn in 1979, 1980 and 1981.

The location of the bow shock varies with how hard the solar wind is blowing, Kurth said. As the magnetosphere repeatedly expanded and contracted while Cassini was approaching Saturn, the spacecraft crossed the bow shock seven times.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. JPL designed, developed and assembled the Cassini orbiter.

For the latest images and more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini.

Cassini Gets a Look at Saturn Moon Titan

By JOHN ANTCZAK
The Associated Press
Saturday, July 3, 2004; 3:54 AM


PASADENA, Calif. - The U.S.-European Cassini spacecraft strained to see through the murky atmosphere of Titan on its first flyby of Saturn's enormous moon.



The raw, unprocessed images from Cassini's flyby at a distance of about 200,000 miles early Friday had little clarity.

"We were hoping that we'd get lucky and they'd be clearer, that the Titan atmosphere when we finally got there would be maybe not so hazy," said Carolyn Porco, the Cassini imaging team leader.

Some things were visible to imaging experts, and Porco was certain that some were surface features. The images were to undergo processing to try to draw more out of them.

"We haven't applied our full bag of tricks yet," she said.

Titan images recorded in June from millions of miles away appeared to show linear features that could suggest tectonic activity in Titan, Porco said.

There will be many more chances to uncover the face of Titan during Cassini's planned four-year tour. Cassini will make 45 flybys of the moon and then send a probe into its atmosphere in January.

The probe, named Huygens, will send pictures back to Cassini as it makes a 2 1/2-hour descent by parachute through the atmosphere.

Titan was Cassini's first encounter since the spacecraft began orbiting Saturn this week.

The frustrating haze is part of what makes Titan interesting to scientists.

"That haze is kind of an organic goo much like the smog that one might see in Los Angeles, composed of hydrocarbons, and not allowing us to see through to the surface," said Linda Spilker, the Cassini deputy project scientist.

Scientists believe Titan could have chemical compounds much like those that existed on Earth billions of years ago before life appeared.

Big enough to be a planet in its own right, Titan has an atmosphere 1 1/2 times as dense as Earth's, containing organic - meaning carbon-based - compounds. Scientists believe there could be hydrocarbon seas or lakes.

The $3.3 billion dollar mission, funded by NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency, was launched in 1997. The spacecraft flew 2.2 billion miles on a roundabout route to Saturn.

---

On the Net:

Cassini Pierces Titan's Veil of Smog, Clouds
Sat 3 July, 2004 22:15



By Gina Keating

PASADENA, Calif. (Reuters) - The Cassini spacecraft pierced the haze enveloping Titan, Saturn's largest moon, to reveal surface details that already have shattered theories about its composition, scientists said on Saturday.

Cassini, launched nearly seven years ago by an international team of scientists, became the first spacecraft to orbit Saturn and its rings and moons during an "orbit insertion" maneuver on Wednesday.

The space probe performed so flawlessly during its 2.2 billion-mile journey to Saturn that scientists scrapped an orbit correction planned for Saturday.

On its first trip past Titan on Thursday, the robotic probe snapped infrared images that left scientists puzzled.

"This is the best view of the surface yet and we don't know what to make of it," scientist Elizabeth Turtle said at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Black-and-white photos taken at 210,600 miles above Titan's surface show a murky landscape that Turtle likened to a "melting ice cream sundae" with some fuzzy linear structures that could be mountains, rivers or fault lines.

That scientists were able to discern features other than circular impact craters suggests Titan has geologic activity similar to that of Earth, Turtle said.

"It's dangerous to interpret a surface we've never seen especially on so little sleep," she said. "But we can't resist."

FLOTSAM AND JETSAM

Scientists will get a better shot at Titan in October, when Cassini descends to 750 miles to snap close-ups of the moon, whose atmosphere and soil resemble those of primordial Earth and may contain the building blocks of life.

Scientists had believed bright patches on Titan's surface seen in earlier observations were pure water ice.

But the first infrared images taken by Cassini revealed water ice as dark patches because it is mixed with "flotsam and jetsam" that may be organic material that rained onto the surface, scientist Kevin Baines said.

The infrared mapping of some 2 percent of Titan's surface did not reveal what scientists hope to see during the four-year principal mission -- bright flashes denoting liquid on Titan's otherwise frozen surface, Baines said.

The infrared map did show a mass of clouds the size of Arizona in Titan's southern hemisphere that may rain down liquid methane and could be linked to storms or an upthrust on the moon's surface, Baines said.

The team thinks that liquid methane may play the same role on Titan that water plays on Earth, Turtle said.

Cassini also mapped for the first time the interaction between the magnetosphere, the huge magnetic bubble that surrounds the Saturn system, and Titan's dynamic atmosphere.

The 50,000-mile-wide gas cloud follows Titan in its orbit around Saturn and is evidence that the moon's upper atmosphere is breaking down, scientist Stamatios Krimigis said.

"Titan is gradually losing material from the top of its atmosphere and that material is being dragged around Saturn," Krimigis said. "We think ... reactions from the surface percolate up and fuel the (upper atmosphere) reaction."

The spacecraft also returned data that showed it has survived some 100,000 impacts with space dust particles the size of smoke as it flew through Saturn's ring planes during the orbit insertion maneuver, scientist Don Gurnett said.

The $3 billion Cassini mission, a joint project of NASA, and the European and Italian space agencies, is hailed as a model of international cooperation, with scientists from 17 countries participating.




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Secrets Of The Rings
What Cassini discovered when it got to Saturn ?- and the wonders it may uncover in the mission to come
By JEFFREY KLUGER



Monday, Jul. 12, 2004
For a spacecraft that had spent nearly seven years in flight and journeyed more than 2.2 billion miles to get where it was going, the Cassini-Huygens Saturn probe did a funny thing when it closed in on the ringed planet last week: it hid.

Traveling at a breakneck 54,000 m.p.h.--four times its cruising speed ?- the ship was no longer flying toward the planet but falling toward it, on a high-speed trajectory that could send it skimming past Saturn and back out into space. If the ship was going to enter a stable orbit, it would have to fire its little braking rocket for 96 min., until it reached the right speed and position to dart upward through a gap in Saturn's rings and begin circling the giant world. But when it comes to the dense rivers of ice and rubble that form the planet's rings, the word gap is an imprecise term. Even a seemingly clear opening can be swarming with dust and particles. A collision with a bit of cosmic buckshot no bigger than a marble could destroy the ship. Making matters worse, the 930 million miles separating Saturn and Earth mean that even moving at the speed of light, radio instructions take 84 min. to travel out and another 84 to come back. Thus the ship would be operating entirely alone during its high-wire maneuver, all of its commands preloaded into its computer. As Cassini-Huygens approached the gap, it carried out, as preinstructed, one final step to protect itself: it turned around and pointed its large, dish-shaped antenna forward ?- a makeshift shield to protect the fragile hardware behind.





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"Engine turn-on," announced the propulsion engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., at 7:36 p.m. (P.T.), when the signal came down that the ship's fire had been lit. For the next hour and a half, the room was largely quiet. It was not until 9:12 that the same engineer spoke the words that meant the engine firing was over and the spacecraft had survived.

"We have burn complete," he said.

At that, the mission controllers, who in recent years have whipsawed between the devastation of the shuttle disaster and the celebration of the Mars landings, once again had reason to cheer, whoop and slap one another on the back.

For a nation struggling with war and terrorism, as well as alienation from some longtime allies, the scientific triumph was a moment to remind the world what the U.S. still does better than anyone else ever has, marshalling its imagination and technological prowess to send robotic emissaries into outer space. It didn't hurt the effort to mend international fences that the mission is being conducted in collaboration with the European and Italian space agencies. And it didn't hurt the domestic sense of pride that the arrival at Saturn occurred in the run-up to the Fourth of July.

"This is a story of human accomplishment," exulted Carolyn Porco, leader of the Cassini imaging team. "How can anyone not be excited about that?"

It would be hard, indeed. The Cassini-Huygens mission will now begin an extended tour of the glittering Saturnian system with its seven rings, 31 moons and untold cosmic secrets. By any measure, this is the most sophisticated planetary probe NASA has ever flown. About the size of a small bus, the Cassini orbiter is more than 22 ft. tall and weighs more than 6 tons when fueled. An engineering marvel, it is packed with a dozen scientific instruments and powered by a miniature nuclear generator. Carried on its side like a high-tech papoose is the Huygens lander, a 9-ft., 700-lb. wok-shaped probe that this winter will plunge through the atmosphere of Saturn's mysterious moon Titan, aiming for the most remote landing any human-made machine has ever achieved on another celestial body.

From the Jul. 12, 2004 issue of TIME magazine

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There is a photo galley to be seen on this site. Just look around on the page for it.http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/2661782#

Edgar, the link for the photograph didn't come through. Can you edit?

I'm hoping all my tax money was spent on Cassini.