Word: cassinis
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Saturn has been ready for its close-up for a long time. On June 30 the planet is going to get it as the $1.4 billion Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, after a journey of 2.2 billion miles, fires its retrorockets and puts itself into Saturnian orbit...
...spacecraft will penetrate that atmosphere with radar and a free-flying 705-lb. conical probe (the Huygens half of the Cassini-Huygens tandem), scheduled to plunge into the Titanian skies on Jan. 14, 2005. Huygens will make a 2 1/2-hr. parachute descent, transmitting data all the way. When it touches down, having made the most distant landing ever by an earthly probe, it is expected to survive for no more than half an hour. Cassini, designed to live much longer, should be beaming back data until...
...CASSINI ORBITER...
Twenty-two feet long and weighing in at 4,700 lbs. unfueled, Cassini is an extraterrestrial truck bristling with a dozen instruments. It is protected by Kapton blankets that shield it from micrometeorite hits and warm it against the deep freeze of space. Inside, it operates at room temperature...
...style internal politics of Kennedy's West Wing, but otherwise there is nothing particularly revelatory or shocking here. And there's something a little surreal about the book's lack of perspective. Kennedy was a President who confronted the unthinkable in many forms, be it nuclear annihilation or Oleg Cassini dancing the twist with Robert McNamara. Grace and Power gives them equal weight. --By Lev Grossman