Word: cassini
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Closing in at 42,500 m.p.h., one of the largest and most complex spacecraft ever built will pass only 725 miles from Earth early next week on its way to a 2004 rendezvous with Saturn, its spectacular rings and its giant moon, Titan. The ship is Cassini, and while it's an object of pride for space scientists, it's an object of fear for antinuclear activists...
Weighing in at around six tons at its launch in October 1997, Cassini lacked the rocket power to fly directly out to Saturn, which is on average 800 million miles from Earth. Instead it headed inward, swooping twice around Venus for "gravity assists" to increase its speed. Its upcoming encounter with Earth will boost its velocity further, and a flyby of Jupiter in 2000 will give the ship the final kick it needs to reach Saturn...
...next week's approach that frightens the activists. Should Cassini pass too close to Earth and burn up in the atmosphere, they warn, radioactive plutonium in the generators that provide the craft's electricity could cause millions of cancer deaths. Most scientists and doctors scoff at such claims. Any plutonium vaporized in an accident, they explain, would be so diluted in the atmosphere that it would pose no real threat to most people. Still, activists say, had Cassini been equipped with solar panels for electricity, all danger could have been averted...
...they just leave the President alone?" That's the question Sherman Oaks fourth-grader Cassini Quinones asks. "She says he seems to be a nice man, and the world is running O.K., and isn't he doing his job?" says her father Adolfo. "This comes from a nine-year-old! Children are very smart. She wanted to know what allegations are. I explained that it's like when your brother says something about you is true, but we don't have proof...
NASA delays the launch of the Cassini space probe, the plutonium-powered spacecraft that has been mired in controversy (TIME Daily...