Launched in 1997, Cassini-Huygens is a joint US-Europe mission to explore Saturn and its moons.
A key point in the mission occurred in 2005 when NASA's orbiter Cassini released Europe's Huygens probe into the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan. Huygens parachuted through the moon's thick atmosphere and landed. Photographs and other data returned by the probe gave scientists a far more detailed understanding of this world.
Photo: Artist's impression of the Cassini-Huygens probe (NASA)
The night launch of the space probe Cassini was more spectacular than usual for some of the watching scientists.
Professor Brian Cox shows how a picture taken by the Cassini spacecraft proves the existence of lakes of liquid on Titan.
Professor Brian Cox visits NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the control centre for the Cassini mission to Saturn. He learns how Saturn can help us understand the early Solar System.
Professor Brian Cox meets Professor Carolyn Porco to find out what the Cassini spacecraft discovered about Saturn's curious moon Enceladus.
Sir Patrick Moore spoke to his guests, Professor John Zarnecki from the Open University and Professor Michele Dougherty from Imperial College, about Saturn's core, magnetic field and storms shortly after the Cassini-Huygens probe reached the ringed planet in 2004.
Cassini–Huygens is a joint NASA/ESA/ASI spacecraft mission studying the planet Saturn and its many natural satellites since 2004. Launched in 1997 after nearly two decades of gestation, it includes a Saturn orbiter and an atmospheric probe/lander for the moon Titan, although it has also returned data on a wide variety of other things including the Heliosphere, Jupiter, and relativity tests. The Titan probe, Huygens, entered and landed on Titan in 2005. Cassini is the fourth space probe to visit Saturn and the first to enter orbit, with its mission ongoing as of 2012.
It launched on October 15, 1997 on a Titan IVB/Centaur and entered into orbit around Saturn on July 1, 2004, after an interplanetary voyage which included flybys of Earth, Venus, and Jupiter. On December 25, 2004, Huygens separated from the orbiter at approximately 02:00 UTC. It reached Saturn's moon Titan on January 14, 2005, when it entered Titan's atmosphere and descended downward to the surface. It successfully returned data to Earth, using the orbiter as a relay. This was the first landing ever accomplished in the outer Solar System.
Sixteen European countries and the United States make up the team responsible for designing, building, flying and collecting data from the Cassini orbiter and Huygens probe. The mission is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the United States, where the orbiter was assembled. Huygens was developed by the European Space Research and Technology Centre, whose prime contractor was Alcatel of France. Equipment and instruments for the probe were supplied by many countries. The Italian Space Agency (ASI) provided the Cassini probe's high-gain radio antenna, and a compact and lightweight radar, which serves as a synthetic aperture radar, a radar altimeter, and a radiometer.
On April 16, 2008, NASA announced a two-year extension of the funding for ground operations of this mission, at which point it was renamed to the Cassini Equinox Mission. This was again extended in February 2010 with the Cassini Solstice Mission continuing until 2017. The current end of mission plan is a 2017 Saturn impact. That same year, 2017, Juno will be de-orbited by a crash into Jupiter. That would mark the end of U.S. exploration of the outer planets, as no new missions are planned.
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