Cassini-Huygens Mission Status Report - October 26, 2004

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109 TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

Carolina Martinez (818) 354-9382
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

Don Savage (202) 358-1727
NASA Headquarters, Washington

Status Report: 2004-263 October 26, 2004

Cassini-Huygens Mission Status Report

The Cassini spacecraft beamed back information and pictures
tonight after successfully skimming the hazy atmosphere of
Saturn's moon Titan. NASA's Deep Space Network tracking
station in Madrid, Spain, acquired a signal at about 6:25 p.m.
Pacific Daylight Time (9:25 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time).
As anticipated, the spacecraft came within 1,200 kilometers
(750 miles) of Titan's surface.

At the time, Cassini was about 1.3 billion kilometers (826
million miles) from Earth. Numerous images, perhaps
as many as 500, were taken by the visible light camera and
were being transmitted back to Earth. It takes 1 hour and
14 minutes for the images to travel from the spacecraft to
Earth. The downlink of data will continue through the night
into the early morning hours. Cassini project engineers will
continue to keep a close watch on a rainstorm in Spain, which
may interrupt the flow of data from the spacecraft.

The flyby was by far the closest any spacecraft has ever come
to Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, perpetually drenched
in a thick blanket of smog. Titan is a prime target of the
Cassini-Huygens mission because it is the only moon in our
solar system with an atmosphere. It is a cosmic time capsule
that offers a look back in time to see what Earth might have
been like before the appearance of life.

The Huygens probe, built and operated by the European Space
Agency, is attached to Cassini; its release is planned on
Christmas Eve. It will descend through Titan's opaque
atmosphere on Jan. 14, 2005, to collect data and touch
down on the surface.

The latest information and images from Cassini are available
at http://www.nasa.gov/cassini . Additional information on
the mission and raw images are
at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov .

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA,
the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California
Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the
Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate,
Washington, D.C.

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