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Scientists Marvel at Images, Success of Saturn Spacecraft

Posted on: Wednesday, 11 August 2004, 06:00 CDT

Scientists marvel at images, success of Saturn spacecraft

Cassini probe sends back sights and sounds of dazzlingly close encounter

By Guy Gugliotta

Washington Post

PASADENA, Calif. - Carolyn Porco, eyes still rapt with wonder, watched the Cassini spacecraft's first images of Saturn's rings blink across NASA's screens Thursday in a dazzling montage: a string- like band in space, trailing a wispy tail of icy dust; a bright ribbon of white, with scalloped edges like sand ridges on a Carolina beach; a grainy hodgepodge of unknown stuff, matted like straw in a manger.

"I don't think you have to be a ring scientist to understand what this was for us," said Porco, the imaging team leader for the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn. She blinked: "It's just beyond description."

Benumbed from lack of sleep and the tensions of shepherding a $3.3 billion spacecraft into orbit around the solar system's sixth planet, scientists at California's Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Thursday studied ring photographs, listened to sonic booms from the solar wind and marveled at how the most ambitious space science mission in history was unfolding - just about perfectly.

"I feel humbled because nothing ever happens this way," said David Southwood, director of scientific programs for the European Space Agency, which teamed with NASA and and the Italian Space Agency to send Cassini-Huygens aloft.

"You do the best you can, but the thing about being in space is you can't go up and fix it."

In a spectacular finale to a seven-year voyage from Earth, Cassini-Huygens soared up through Saturn's rings late Wednesday night, settled into orbit and, by dawn Thursday, had swooped back down through the rings, outward bound on the first of 76 circuits of Saturn, along the way transmitting data and photographs from the closest encounter that any human-made object had ever had with the planet.

The spacecraft will tour Saturn and its environs for four years, and perhaps much longer, depending on when its fuel runs out, studying a planetary neighborhood that mimics the solar system in many respects and that should provide clues to its formation more than 4 billion years ago and, perhaps, to the origins of life.

"It's like having a library in the solar system," said the University of Iowa's William Kurth, who is studying Saturn's magnetic field as part of the project. "We can explore all kinds of things that we can't explore on Earth."

Following the perfectly executed 96-minute rocket "burn" that put the spacecraft into orbit, ground controllers ran checks on all its operating systems as well as the 18 instruments it is carrying: "Every subsystem is completely flawless," project manager Robert Mitchell said at a news conference Thursday. "The spacecraft status is just about perfect."

Mitchell said Wednesday's burn had transpired so successfully that navigators predicted the first orbit of Saturn would finish "within a day" of the planned 116 days, and controllers were trying to decide whether to bother with a "trajectory clean-up maneuver" - a brief engine firing to eliminate the discrepancy.

Today, Cassini-Huygens will have the first of 45 close encounters with Titan, Saturn's largest moon and the object that the spacecraft will use for the gravity boosts it needs to change the length and direction of its orbits as it travels the Saturnian system.

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