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First Close Encounter of Saturn's Hazy Moon Titan



 
 
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Old October 26th 04, 07:11 AM
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Default First Close Encounter of Saturn's Hazy Moon Titan



Ron wrote:

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, D.C.

News Release: 2004-262 October 25, 2004

First Close Encounter of Saturn's Hazy Moon Titan

Long hidden behind a thick veil of haze, Titan, the only known
moon with an atmosphere, is ready for its close-up on Oct. 26,
2004. This visit by the Cassini spacecraft may settle intense
speculation about whether this moon of Saturn harbors oceans of
liquid methane and ethane beneath its coat of clouds.

Cassini will fly by Titan at a distance of 1,200 kilometers (745
miles), with closest approach at 9:44 a.m. Pacific Time. This
flyby will be nearly 300 times closer than the first Cassini
flyby of Titan, on July 3.

This is one of 45 planned flybys of Titan during the four-year
tour. Subsequent flybys will bring the spacecraft even closer.
Scientists believe Titan's atmosphere is similar to that of early
Earth.

"Cassini will see Titan as it has never been seen before. We
expect the onboard instruments will pierce the moon's dense
atmosphere and reveal a whole new world," said Dr. Charles
Elachi, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena,
Calif., and team leader for the Cassini radar instrument.

One important goal of this flyby is to confirm scientists' model
of Titan's atmosphere to prepare for the Huygens probe descent.
The probe, built and managed by the European Space Agency, will
be cut loose from its mother ship on Christmas Eve and will coast
through the atmosphere of Titan. On the way down, the probe will
sample the atmosphere with a sophisticated set of scientific
instruments.

"Titan has been lying still, waiting. Cassini may finally show
us if what we thought of this moon is true, and whether the
Huygens probe touchdown will be a splash," said Dr. Jean-Pierre
Lebreton, Huygens project manager and project scientist for the
European Space Research and Technology Center, Noordwijk,
Netherlands.

Eleven of Cassini's 12 instruments will be aimed at Titan during
this encounter. Scientists hope to learn more about Titan's
interior structure, surface, atmosphere and interaction with
Saturn's magnetosphere. This first in-place sampling of Titan's
atmosphere will help in understanding the atmosphere's density
and composition, which, in turn, will help aid management of the
Huygens probe. This flyby will mark the first time Cassini's
imaging radar is used to observe Titan, and is expected to
provide topographical maps and show whether there is a liquid or
solid surface.

"We know our instrument will see through the haze to Titan's
surface," said Dr. Robert H. Brown, team leader for the visual
and infrared mapping spectrometer, University of Arizona, Tucson.
"This encounter is about digging down below the atmosphere and
getting our first glimpse of Titan geology."

Cassini's ion and neutral mass spectrometer will taste
mysterious, subtle flavors in Titan's atmosphere. "Our
instrument will scoop up a breath of Titan's puffy atmosphere
during the flyby," said Roger Yelle, instrument team member, also
with the University of Arizona. The experiment will measure how
many molecules of different masses it gathers in the gulp of
Titan's mostly nitrogen, methane-laced atmosphere.

Titan is Saturn's largest moon. It is larger than Mercury or
Pluto and is the second largest moon in the solar system, after
Jupiter's moon Ganymede. Titan is a cold place thought to be
inhospitable to life at 95 degrees Kelvin (minus 289 degrees
Fahrenheit).

Cassini has performed flawlessly since entering orbit around
Saturn on June 30. The team believes that on Tuesday night, all
will proceed as planned.

"This is not the same white-knuckle situation we had during
Saturn orbit insertion, but there are some things we can't
control," said Earl Maize, deputy project manager for the Cassini-
Huygens mission at JPL. "If a spacecraft anomaly should occur,
or if the weather at the tracking stations does not cooperate,
the science return may be limited or lost. Although this is an
unlikely scenario, the possibility still exists." Cassini will
have only one opportunity to send the data back to Earth before
the data are overwritten on the recorders by data from the next
set of observations. The first downlink of data by NASA's Deep
Space Network occurs at 6:30 p.m. PDT.

More information on the Cassini-Huygens mission is available at
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini .

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.

- end -


 




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