Word: saturns
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...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 the atmosphere at 42,000 m.p.h. and vaporize, releasing enough plutonium to be inhaled by millions of people. The radiation from P-238 is harmless under most conditions, but breathing in particles of it can be deadly. It is, says...
...Vallis late last week is how unremarkable they are. NASA's early interplanetary spacecraft--the Vikings, the Pioneers, the Voyagers--were limousine ships packed with dozens of scientific instruments and countless backup systems. On the surface, of course, this made sense. "If you've never been to Jupiter or Saturn before," says Golombek, "you want a whole bunch of instruments to cover the sphere of what you want to know...
...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...
...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...