![]() ![]() This website was first established in 1999, a year before our gravity-assist flyby of Jupiter, for the purpose of logging the mission's highlights and our reactions to them. The outcome was always a moment of triumph. Often on the heels of one exquisitely close moon flyby, or passage through an especially revealing geometry for viewing the planet's rings or its largest moon, Titan, came another encounter of equal measure. The account of the Imaging Team's survey of the Saturnian system and our discoveries there, told here in imagery, video, graphics, descriptive text, artwork, and technical scientific reports, is not surprisingly a lengthy chronicle of events with a repeating, recognizable signature: Methodical observation, breathtaking vistas, and painstaking analyses that yielded scientific gold, played out over and over again. Its primary assignment: comb the Saturnian environment, zoom in closer on those bodies and phenomena that were already known, spy intently for anything previously unnoticed, and keep all within its senses under close watch, with far greater precision and completeness than had been possible during the brief Voyager flybys in 19.Īnd that is exactly what Cassini's scientists and engineers did. While its predecessor, Voyager, went far and wide, coursing through the houses of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune on its way to interstellar space, Cassini went deep and long. ![]() To its fiery plunge into the planet's atmosphere in late 2017. from its launch in the fall of 1997, through its insertion into Saturn orbit in the summer of 2004, It became an adventure so magnificent in its rewards, so thrilling in its acrobatics, so momentous in its findings that it held people in its thrall the world over during its 20 years in flight. The Cassini mission was humanity's first sweeping, in-depth, long-duration scientific exploration of this far-away realm. all a billion miles and a destiny away from Earth. Recorded on the pages of this website is the story of a daring, robotic expedition to the planet Saturn, its immense empire of dozens of moons, and its vast gleaming disk of icy debris. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |