The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft returned this image of Saturn on May 16, 2004, when its imaging science subsystem narrow-angle camera was too close to fit the entire planet in its field-of-view. Culminating a nearly seven-year, 2.2 billion-mile journey through the solar system, NASA's Cassini spacecraft will fire its engine Wednesday, June 30, 2004, to slow down and allow itself to be captured by Saturn.
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm
- posted on 06/30/2004
Spacecraft Cassini to Enter Saturn Orbit
By JOHN ANTCZAK, Associated Press Writer
PASADENA, Calif. - After nearly seven years of travel, the international Cassini spacecraft is finally within striking distance of its heavenly destination: Saturn.
The U.S.-European spacecraft was due to enter Saturn's orbit Wednesday night to begin a four-year tour of the giant planet, its shimmering rings and some of its 31 known moons.
"We're right on track," navigation team chief Jeremy Jones told a press conference Tuesday at NASA (news - web sites)'s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Cassini was programmed to ascend through a gap between two of Saturn's rings, fire its rocket for 96 minutes to slow down, and then descend back through the ring plane.
Cassini program manager Robert Mitchell called orbit insertion a "hair-graying" event, but he and other officials expressed confidence in a successful outcome.
"This whole mission has been an incredibly smooth one to fly," said Julie Webster, the spacecraft team chief at JPL. The $3.3 billion mission was launched Kennedy Space Center on Oct. 15, 1997.
At 12,593 pounds, the 22-foot-long and 13-foot-wide Cassini was too massive to be launched on a direct trajectory to Saturn so it was sent toward the inner solar system, where it received two gravity assists from Venus and one from Earth.
The Earth flyby gave Cassini enough of a boost for a December 2000 flyby of Jupiter, which in turn boosted it toward Saturn. On arrival Cassini will have traveled 2.2 billion miles.
Cassini, laden with a dozen instruments, also carries a probe named Huygens that will be launched into the murky atmosphere of the moon Titan. The frozen moon intrigues scientists because it may have many of the chemical compounds that existed on Earth before life began.
Scientists see the Saturn system as a model of the early solar system when the sun was surrounded by a disk of material. Studying it may increase understanding of how the planets formed.
"We're about to start on a delicious smorgasbord of scientific opportunities," said Dennis Matson, the Cassini project scientist.
In December, Huygens will be launched toward Titan, which has a thick atmosphere rich in nitrogen, but also containing methane. Images taken by Cassini this month showed Titan has complex surface markings and individual bright areas.
"It's probably the most exotic object in the solar system," said Jean-Pierre Lebreton, the Huygens mission manager and scientist with the European Space Agency.
The presence of carbon molecules may mean that Titan is similar to what Earth was like more than 4 billion years ago, before life appeared, he said.
Huygens will enter Titan's atmosphere in early January, radioing findings back to Cassini as it makes a lengthy descent by parachute. Scientists don't know if Huygens will land on a hard surface or splash down into an ethane-methane ocean.
"I just hope, or maybe dream, that we are really going to see oceans on Titan," Lebreton said. - Re: Cassini arrives at Saturn (土星) / 感想posted on 06/30/2004
在等消息。每次想到人类能设计、制造、发射、控制那么一个个小小的飞行器,送到那么小小的一个个行星上,都觉得感慨万分。这个 Cassini 已经走了七年了,加入了欧日各国的合作参与,是第一个国际项目,又是至今建造的最复杂的探测器。
Human beings are unbelievably curious, courageous, and hopeful. Love and peace to all. - Re: Cassini arrives at Saturn (土星) June 30, 2004posted on 06/30/2004
Thank Ah Shan for the article. I have a strange yet enduring feeling that maybe some day I can look at earth from space and decide where I should belong. :) - Re: Cassini arrives at Saturn (土星) June 30, 2004posted on 07/01/2004
This image released July 1, 2004, is a narrow angle camera image of Saturn's rings taken by the Cassini spacecraft after the successful completion of the orbit insertion burn and was cruising over the rings.
- Re: Cassini arrives at Saturn (土星) June 30, 2004posted on 07/02/2004
美丽的土冒的最大问题是肉眼看不见。:( - posted on 07/03/2004
Henry Miller's very gloomy view of Saturn.
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But let us pass on--to Saturn. Saturn, and our moon likewise, when seen through a magnifying lens, are impressive to the layman in way which the scientist must instinctively deplore and deprecate. No facts or figures about Saturn, no magnification, can explain the unreasonably disquieting sensation which the sight of this planet produces upon the mind of the spectator. Saturn is a living symbol of gloom, morbidity, disaster, fatality. Its milk-white hue inevitably arouses associations with tripe, dead grey matter, vulnerable organs hidden from sight, loathsome diseases, test-tubes, laboratory specimens, catarrh, rheum, ectoplasm, melancholy shades, morbid phenomena, incubus and succuba war, sterility, anaemia, indecision, defeatism, constipation, anti-toxins, feeble novels, hernia, meningitis, dead-letter laws, read tape, working-class conditions, sweat shops, Y.M.C.A.s, Christian Endeavour meetings, spiritist séances, poets like T.S. Eliot, zealots like Alexander Dowie, healers like Mary Baker Eddy, statesmen like Chamberlain, trivial fatalities like slipping on a banana peel and cracking one’s skull, dreaming of better days and getting wedged between two motor trucks, drowning in one’s own bathtub, killing one’s best friend accidentally, dying of hiccoughs instead of on the battlefield, and so on ad infinitum. Saturn is malefic through force of inertia. Its ring, which is only paperweight in thickness, according to the savants, is the wedding ring which signifies death or misfortune devoid of all significance. Saturn, whatever it may be to the astronomer, is the sign of senseless fatality to the man in the street. He carries it in his heart because his whole life, devoid of significance as it is, is wrapped up in this ultimate symbol which, if all else fails to do him in, this he can count upon to finish him off. Saturn is life in suspense, not dead so much as deathless, i.e. incapable of dying. Saturn is like dead bone in the ear--double mastoid for the soul. Saturn is like a roll of wall-paper wrong side out and seared with that catarrhal paste which wall-paperers find so indispensable in their métier. Saturn is a vast agglomeration of those evil-looking shreds which one hawks up the morning after one has smoked several packets of crisp, toasted, coughless, inspiring cigarettes. Saturn is postponement manifesting itself as an accomplishment in itself. Saturn is doubt, perplexity, skepticism, facts for fact’s sake and no hokum, no mysticism, understand? Saturn is the diabolical sweat of learning for its own sake, the congealed fog of the monomaniac’s ceaseless pursuit of what is always just beyond his nose. Saturn is deliciously melancholic because it knows and recognizes nothing beyond melancholy; it swims in its own fat. Saturn is the symbol of all omens and superstitions, the phony proof of divine entropy, phony because if it were true that the universe is running down Saturn would have melted away long ago. Saturn is as eternal as fear and irresolution, growing more milky, more cloudy, with each compromise, each capitulation. Timid souls cry for Saturn just as children are reputed to cry for Castoria. Saturn gives us only what we ask for, never an ounce extra. Saturn is the white hope of the white race which prattles endlessly about the wonders of nature and spends its time killing off the greatest wonder of all--MAN. Saturn is the stellar imposter setting itself up as the grand cosmocrator of Fate, Monsieur le Paris, the automatic pole-axer of a world smitten with ataraxy. Let the heavens sings its glory--this lymphatic globe of doubt and ennui will never cease to cast its milk-white rays of lifeless gloom.
This is the emotional photograph of a planet whose unorthodox influence still weighs heavily upon the almost extinct consciousness of man. It is the most cheerless spectacle in the heavens. It corresponds to every craven image conceived in the heart of man; it is the single repository of all the despair and defeat to which the human race from time immemorial has succumbed. It will become invisible only when man has purged it from his consciousness.
-- from The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller
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