Word: saturns
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Traveling at a breakneck 54,000 m.p.h.--four times its cruising speed--the ship was no longer flying toward the planet but falling toward it, on a high-speed trajectory that could send it skimming past Saturn and back out into space. If the ship was going to enter a stable orbit, it would have to fire its little braking rocket for 96 min., until it reached the right speed and position to dart upward through a gap in Saturn's rings and begin circling the giant world. But when it comes to the dense rivers of ice and rubble...
...technological prowess to send robotic emissaries into outer space. It didn't hurt the effort to mend international fences that the mission is being conducted in collaboration with the European and Italian space agencies. And it didn't hurt the domestic sense of pride that the arrival at Saturn occurred in the run-up to the Fourth of July...
...keeping things warm. Cassini will deploy its cameras, infrared sensors, chemical spectrographs and more to deconstruct the planet's atmosphere and find out for sure. Other instruments will map the planet's magnetosphere and gravitational field, perhaps confirming the theory that even so massive a ball of gas as Saturn has a solid core...
...rings that Saturn is known, and it was close-up pictures of those rings that stole the show last week. Within minutes of Cassini's arrival, the ship's camera had fired off 61 shots of the rings, and by 10 o'clock the next morning, wide-eyed Cassini scientists were showing them to the press. "I don't think we've ever seen structures like this before," said Porco...
...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...