Word: cassini
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...October 1997--about a month from now--and a Titan IV rocket has just lifted off the pad at Cape Canaveral. Perched on top is the Cassini spacecraft, one of the most ambitious probes NASA has ever launched. If the mission goes as planned, Cassini will reach Saturn in 2004 and spend the next four years exploring the giant ringed planet and most of its 18 icy moons...
According to a small but vocal group of antinuclear activists, however, there's much more to worry about than upset feelings. Like all the deep-space probes that have gone before it, Cassini is powered by radioactive isotopes--in this case about 72 lbs. of plutonium 238. If the spacecraft were destroyed, insist these critics, some of the plutonium could be pulverized and wafted away by the wind. Even worse, Cassini is supposed to swing by Earth in 1999 for a gravity assist that would sling it out toward Saturn. If the probe comes too close, it could re-enter...
...cheap ones, hammered together from available, off-the-shelf parts. While this makes for less elegant vehicles, it also makes for less pricey ones. They cost no more than $250 million, in contrast to the $1.48 billion it costs to build luxury liners like the still-to-be-launched Cassini Saturn probe. Cheap ships means more of them, and for space planners that is a good thing...
...moons will ever be understood fully, of course, is open to question. Before long, however, they will certainly be understood better. Galileo could be functioning until late 1999, with more than 20 passes through the Jovian system still to come. Next fall NASA plans to launch the new Cassini-Huygens spacecraft on a seven-year odyssey to Saturn. In addition to making at least 36 orbital slalom runs through five of Saturn's inner moons, the ship will fire off a probe that will puncture Titan's cloud cover, parachute to its surface and send environmental readings back to Earth...
Even before Cassini's work begins and Galileo's ends, other ships could be on the way to join them in the outer solar system. NASA is tentatively planning several new Europa probes, including one that will photograph its surface and take radar soundings beneath its crust. If the radar picks up the telltale echoes of liquid water, another spacecraft would be sent to land on Europa and release a heated probe designed to melt through the ice layer and look for signs of life in the seas below...