cranberry
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Oct 31, 2002
- Messages
- 19,286
This struck me as kind of sad. May we never lose our sense of adventure.
The Cassini spacecraft just crashed into Saturn
Cassini was the first human probe to orbit Saturn; launched in 1997 and inserted into orbit in 2004, it revolutionized our understanding of the ringed planet. The spacecraft revealed the structure of Saturn's rings and, by delivering the Huygens probe to the moon Titan, executed the first landing of a spacecraft in the outer solar system. It also exposed two moons — Titan, a land of methane lakes, and Enceladus, which has jets of water streaming from its southern pole — as prime targets in the search for life beyond Earth.
After 13 years in orbit, Cassini leaves researchers with still more mysteries to ponder: they don't know the length of the Saturn day or understand the quirks of its magnetic field. And it will fall to a future mission to discover whether one of Saturn's potentially-habitable moons could truly be home to alien life.
The Cassini spacecraft just crashed into Saturn
Cassini was the first human probe to orbit Saturn; launched in 1997 and inserted into orbit in 2004, it revolutionized our understanding of the ringed planet. The spacecraft revealed the structure of Saturn's rings and, by delivering the Huygens probe to the moon Titan, executed the first landing of a spacecraft in the outer solar system. It also exposed two moons — Titan, a land of methane lakes, and Enceladus, which has jets of water streaming from its southern pole — as prime targets in the search for life beyond Earth.
After 13 years in orbit, Cassini leaves researchers with still more mysteries to ponder: they don't know the length of the Saturn day or understand the quirks of its magnetic field. And it will fall to a future mission to discover whether one of Saturn's potentially-habitable moons could truly be home to alien life.
