* Astronomy

Blobrana · L

The Cassini spacecraft

Blobrana · L

In a special double flyby early next week, NASA's Cassini spacecraft will visit Saturn's moons Titan and Dione within a period of about a day and a half, with no manoeuvres in between. A fortuitous cosmic alignment allows Cassini to attempt this doubleheader, and the interest in swinging by Dione influenced the design of its extended mission.
The Titan flyby, planned for Monday, April 5, will take Cassini to within about 7,500 kilometres of the moon's surface.
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Blobrana · L

The US space agency has just approved a further and final extension to the Saturn probe's mission.
For British planetary scientists, however, this news is bitter-sweet because they were told before Christmas that the funding which supports their work is stopping.
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Blobrana · L

NASA will extend the international Cassini-Huygens mission to explore Saturn and its moons to 2017. The agency's fiscal year 2011 budget provides a $60 million per year extension for continued study of the ringed planet.
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Blobrana · L

Cassini-Huygens mission

Blobrana · L

RE: The Cassini spacecraft

Blobrana · L

The Cassini spaceprobe will make a close flyby, about 955 kilometres, of Titan's north pole this weekend.
The flyby at 82 degrees north latitude, will take place shortly after midnight Universal Time on Dec. 28.
The encounter will enable scientists to gather more detail on how the lake-dotted north polar region of Titan changes with the seasons.
Cassini will also image the bright region called Adiri, where the Huygens probe landed nearly five years ago.

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Blobrana · L

Nasa has released the latest raw images of Saturn's moon Enceladus, from the Cassini spacecraft's extended mission to the planet and its satellites.
The images show the moon's rippling terrain in remarkable clarity.
Cassini started transmitting uncalibrated temperature data and images during a flyby on 21 November.
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Blobrana · L

Cassini Sends Back Images of Enceladus as Winter Nears
NASA's Cassini spacecraft has sailed seamlessly through the Nov. 21 flyby of Saturn's moon Enceladus and started transmitting uncalibrated temperature data and images of the rippling terrain. These data and images will be processed and analysed in the coming weeks. They will help scientists create the most-detailed-yet mosaic image of the southern part of the moon's Saturn-facing hemisphere and a contiguous thermal map of one of the intriguing "tiger stripe" features, with the highest resolution to date.

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Blobrana · L

When NASA's Cassini spacecraft began orbiting Saturn five years ago, a dozen highly-tuned science instruments set to work surveying, sniffing, analysing and scrutinising the Saturnian system.
But Cassini recently revealed new data that appeared to overturn the decades-old belief that our solar system resembled a comet in shape as it moves through the interstellar medium (the matter between stars in our corner of the Milky Way galaxy).
Instead, the new results suggest our heliosphere more closely resembles a bubble - or a rat - being eaten by a boa constrictor: as the solar system passes through the "belly" of the snake, the ribs, which mimic the local interstellar magnetic field, expand and contract as the rat passes.

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