Word: cassini
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...thought to have water locked in permafrost at its poles. Jupiter's moon Europa is probably home to a globe-girdling ocean beneath a thin rind of ice, and its Jovian sisters Callisto and Ganymede appear to be icy and wet too. Now, according to new findings by the Cassini spacecraft, one more name can be added to the list of water worlds: Enceladus, a small moon orbiting Saturn. What's more, Enceladus' water might be unusually hospitable to the emergence of life. (See the 50 highs and lows of space exploration...
...Nixon looked especially awkward losing to John F. Kennedy in 1960, and then following him as president eight years later. His White House was no Camelot; Pat Nixon, of the "good old Republican cloth coat," couldn't match Jackie Kennedy, the movie princess swathed in Cassini couture; and Milhous was, in media terms, a throwback. As Kennedy was the first TV president, Nixon was the last Chief Executive of radio. (See pictures of TIME's JFK covers...
...occur; word of it must then travel to Earth across the vast ocean of the cosmos. The dispatch may move at the speed of light, but the journey can still take hours, years, epochs--turning current events into history long before we ever learn of them. Signals from the Cassini spacecraft, currently studying Saturn's moons, take 84 min. to reach us; the supernova whose cataclysmic birth astronomers observed earlier this year was already fading millions of years...
...orbiter's plume dive was responsible for some of that shifting. Passing just 120 miles (190 km) above the surface of Enceladus, Cassini sampled an icy exhaust that researchers didn't even know existed until the spacecraft spotted it three years ago. NASA expects to release detailed composition information soon, but the ice hints at subsurface water and the attendant possibility of life. Seven more close-brush flybys are in the offing, including one high-wire plunge that will drop the spacecraft a scant 15 miles (24 km) above Enceladus' surface. Says JPL's Spilker: "We're going to taste...
Before the orbiter attempts that maneuver, it will execute two flybys of the moon Titan, whose opaque orange atmosphere has been increasingly pierced by the spacecraft's radar. And this summer Cassini will make an unusually high orbit above Saturn's massive B ring, promising unique images of the ring, spread like an immense halo around the planet. The ship will also have the rare opportunity to observe the sun cross the plane of the ring from south to north, literally shedding light on the B ring's complex particle structure. "We want to know what a particle would look...