- Cassini-Huygens Mission status report

Mike Flugennock said:
In article , "Matt J.
McCullar" wrote:

Thanks for posting the info! I saw a mockup of the Cassini probe last year
and it's a BIG probe.

The time I'm having following the MER missions had helped me pretty much
totally forget the time it was taking for Cassini to get to Saturn. I've
been following Cassini much more closely since the MER landings, as
orbital insertion date drew closer, but the thing that really drove me
nuts was seeing those beautiful full-frame color shots of Saturn that
looked like you could reach out and touch it -- and the craft was still
something like six months out.

I'm absolutely jumping out of my socks at the opportunity to check out
Saturn as closely as I've seen Jupiter -- and those Cassini Jupiter flyby
fotos had me licking my chops anticipating the close Saturn images -- and
thinking of the fotos Huygens will send back from Titan if all goes well
has got me almost totally unable to sit still.

Better than Jupiter. Cassini's instruments are quite a bit
newer than Gallileo's were, and Cassini has a functioning
high gain antenna. Some of the stuff that Gallileo was
supposed to do but didn't, much, we'll see for the first
time with Cassini. Some of the neater aspects of that
will be plenty of high-resolution movies of atmospheric
changes on Saturn and Titan.


Between the extended MER missions and Cassini, I can see I'm going to be
spending a lot of time "off-world" this summer.

Don't forget the X-Prize, the return of the Genesis Solar
Wind samples, and the launches of MESSENGER and Deep Impact
(to add to the launches of Hayabusa/Muses-C and Rosetta).