Cassini where is it now

Perhaps that was because the Cassini mission faced its greatest perils before it even left Earth. The partnership with ESA, which was pouring millions of its own money into the project, made Congress less willing to gut it. In , NASA leadership, facing budget cuts, told engineers to rework their designs for the spacecraft to reduce costs by millions of dollars. Engineers removed platforms that would have allowed scientific instruments to move and point independently of each other, which meant the entire spacecraft would have to pivot to line up an experiment.

Some worried that if Cassini were to explode during launch, the radioactive substance would be sprinkled through the air for miles. Despite the controversy, the launch—plutonium and all—went perfectly. Scientists spent the seven-year cruise to Saturn carefully planning out observations, how much time each team would get and when. Cassini was like a car with a camera glued to the hood. If scientists wanted to get a look at anything, engineers would have to steer the entire spacecraft over.

After years of budget scares and hardware tweaks and plutonium protests, they were finally there. In December , Cassini released Huygens over Titan. And Titan may have two different habitable environments; it's possible that "weird life" that depends on liquid hydrocarbons, rather than on water, could exist on the moon's surface, astrobiologists say.

Indeed, the potential habitability of Titan and Enceladus spurred Cassini's death dive today. The spacecraft's handlers wanted to make sure that Cassini — which was nearly out of fuel — never contaminated either moon with microbes from Earth. Huygens was a piggyback probe that rode with Cassini and touched down on Titan's surface in January , pulling off the first-ever soft landing on a world in the outer solar system. Originally published on Space. As It Is.

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Direct link p 6. Newest Newest Oldest. This forum has been closed. Back to top. First landing in the outer solar system. First to sample an extraterrestrial ocean. Cassini expanded our understanding of the kinds of worlds where life might exist.

Cassini was, in a sense, a time machine. It revealed the processes that likely shaped the development of our solar system.

What Cassini found at Saturn prompted scientists to rethink their understanding of the solar system. Cassini represented a staggering achievement of human and technical complexity, finding innovative ways to use the spacecraft. Cassini revealed the beauty of Saturn, its rings and moons, inspiring our sense of wonder. I've been here ever since.

You don't have to be a genius to be successful. We fly spacecraft around other planets; how much better can it get? All will serve you well regardless of what you do.

Before the mission ended, Cassini was an already powerful influence on future exploration. In revealing that Enceladus has essentially all the ingredients needed for life, the mission energized a pivot to the exploration of "ocean worlds" that has been sweeping planetary science over the past couple of decades. Europa Clipper will make dozens of flybys of Jupiter's ocean moon to investigate its possible habitability, using an orbital tour design derived from the way Cassini explored Saturn.

Farther out in the solar system, scientists have long had their eyes set on exploring Uranus and Neptune. So far, each of these worlds has been visited by only one brief spacecraft flyby Voyager 2, in and , respectively.

Collectively, Uranus and Neptune are referred to as ice giant planets. A variety of potential mission concepts are discussed in a recently completed study, delivered to NASA in preparation for the next Decadal Survey—including orbiters, flybys, and probes that would dive into Uranus' atmosphere to study its composition. Future missions to the ice giants might explore those worlds using an approach similar to Cassini's mission.

Explore the full archive of raw images collected by the Cassini mission from to Illustrations, artwork and infographics that reveal the inner workings of the Cassini mission. Cassini End-of-Mission Press Kit.