Word: saturnians
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This spring three of the rugged ships stand out from the rest. Near Saturn, the Cassini orbiter, launched by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, just executed a dramatic dive through an icy geyser that reaches 950 miles (1,530 km) into space from the Saturnian moon Enceladus, and there are plans to follow that up with even higher-risk maneuvers. In May NASA's Phoenix Lander will set down in Mars' arctic region in search of water ice. And later this month NASA and the European Space Agency will retire their Ulysses solar surveyor after a 17-year mission that...
...distant moon of Saturn. The temperature averages a brisk -290 degrees F, and the rain is not water but liquid methane. Those are just some of the findings of the remarkable Huygens spacecraft, which landed on Titan two weeks ago. The probe took seven years to fly to the Saturnian system and lived, as planned, for only 70 min. on Titan's plains. But the data it radioed home in the eyeblink of its active life should keep investigators busy for years...
...find out, the 9-ft., 700-lb. Huygens hitched a ride aboard the 6-ton, 22-ft. Cassini orbiter, which reached the Saturnian system last summer. On Christmas Eve, Cassini lobbed Huygens toward Titan, and on Jan. 14 the probe reached the moon, slamming into its atmosphere at 13,000 m.p.h. Throughout a 147-min. parachute descent, Huygens took pictures and sniffed the air. After it landed, it switched on the remainder of its six instruments. What it saw was not very welcoming...
...Cassini-Huygens traveled all the way to Saturn and returned nothing but data on the planet and its rings, the mission would probably still be judged a success. Yet the true scientific goods will come when the spacecraft trains its instruments on the swirl of Saturnian moons. It would be nearly impossible for one ship to visit all 31 known satellites in Saturn's litter, so NASA has selected nine of them, both for their scientific promise and their comparatively convenient locations. The exotic names of the chosen moons--Phoebe, Titan, Iapetus, Enceladus, Mimas, Tethys, Hyperion, Dione and Rhea--hint...
...resurfaced by some kind of underground slurry or perhaps by ice volcanoes. In some places, once deep crevasses have been largely filled in and craters have been cut neatly in half, leaving one side deep and raw and the other covered, as if by snowdrifts. The area of the Saturnian ring that follows in the wake of Enceladus is slightly thicker than the rest, as if the moon were pumping out some kind of frozen exhaust, leaving a plume in its wake like the smoke from a steamship...