Posted on 06/30/2003 11:49:55 PM PDT by alnitak
Woo-hoo!!
There's now only 1 year to go before Cassini-Huygens does SOI - that's Saturn Orbit Insertion, for the un-initiated.
Cassini-Huygens is a joint NASA-ESA mission to Saturn (think Galileo, but for Saturn instead of Jupiter) and has been called "last of the big spenders" - it was the last big inter-planetary probe built before Daniel Goldin's philosophy of "faster, better, cheaper". If you're in doubt about that, just check out the instrument package on the JPL website via the link :-)
The probe consist of two parts - Cassini (NASA/JPL) is the orbiter which will study Saturn, the rings and the satellites, and Huygens (ESA), which is a small descender which will land on Titan.
Titan is the 2nd largest satellite in the solar system with a diameter of 5150km (which makes it larger than Mercury) and the only one with an atmosphere! Huygens will spin as it descends, taking panoramic pictures with its camera. There is speculation that Titan may have oceans. Of the 74 planned orbits of Saturn, 44 will include flybys of Titan.
We should begin to get data before SOI, the first satellite flyby is of Phoebe on June 11 2004, as Cassini heads towards Saturn. NASA will probably also make an approach movie.
Stay tuned, it's gonna be exciting and spectacular!
The probe is called Cassini-Huygens after French astronomer Jean D. Cassini, who discovered the Cassini Division between Saturn's A and B rings (more here). Christiaan Huygens was a Dutch mathemetician/scientist who discovered Titan.
Now, before you all ask, "How do you pronounce Huygens", try this guy's page, which also includes Antony van Leeuwenhoek, the famous microscopist who discovered bacteria, blood cells and sperm cells. I've also got the mp3 file here on my home page, which is probably somewhat bandwidth challenged.
Practice for a couple of weeks and you should be OK.
NASA/JPL Cassini-Huygens Home Page
Lastly, here's the map from the "Where is Cassini now?" web page. The curve just visible to the left is the orbit of Jupiter.
EEEEEWWWWWW!
Great post though.
Anyway, I hope you visited the Leeuwenhoek link:
On September 17, 1683, Leeuwenhoek wrote to the Royal Society about his observations on the plaque between his own teeth, "a little white matter, which is as thick as if 'twere batter." He repeated these observations on two ladies (probably his own wife and daughter), and on two old men who had never cleaned their teeth in their lives. Looking at these samples with his microscope, Leeuwenhoek reported how in his own mouth: "I then most always saw, with great wonder, that in the said matter there were many very little living animalcules, very prettily a-moving. The biggest sort. . . had a very strong and swift motion, and shot through the water (or spittle) like a pike does through the water. The second sort. . . oft-times spun round like a top. . . and these were far more in number." In the mouth of one of the old men, Leeuwenhoek found "an unbelievably great company of living animalcules, a-swimming more nimbly than any I had ever seen up to this time. The biggest sort. . . bent their body into curves in going forwards. . . Moreover, the other animalcules were in such enormous numbers, that all the water. . . seemed to be alive."
Remind me to never buy a microscope.
But still a good post!
I am involved in an aspect of a really cool one, Project Prometheus, which NASA hopes to have up by 2011. It's the "grand tour" of the Jovian icy moons system. The spacecraft will have the capability of being inserted in orbit around one moon, then going out of orbit and moving over to another one, etc. This hasn't been done before because of the prohibitive cost (in launch terms) of the fuel needed to do such maneuvers (same reason why flybys are done instead of orbital insertions - you need to carry too much fuel to slow down effectively). So how can it be done this time? Get rid of the chemical fuel. How can you do that? Well, think of something else with a little more oommph, like n-u-c-l-e- ...
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