Tony Sprague
Erika Harnett
ESS 102
January 28, 2016
Cassini
The Cassini-Huygens space probe is an ongoing space probe mission launched in 1997 through a coalition of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Italian Space Agency (ASI). The probe arrived in the Saturnian system in 2004 and entered orbit the same year. The probe itself also carried a lander named Huygens which it deployed to land on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, which it succeeded in doing so in 2005. Cassini remains in full operation, with its destruction by means of entering Saturn’s atmosphere scheduled for mid-late 2017. During Cassini’s development, scientists had to ponder what questions they wanted answered. They…show more content… It has discovered several new moons orbiting Saturn, all very small and some orbiting between gaps in Saturn’s rings. Those new moons are named Methone, Pallene, Polydeuces, Daphnis, Pan, and Aegaeon. The probe helped scientists make a more accurate measurement of Saturn’s rotational period. Cassini’s flyby of the moon Phoebe gave scientists a better look at its composition, leading them to believe it contains water ice. In 2005, Cassini released its Titan lander, Huygens, which successfully landed on the surface. Huygens discovered that the surface of Titan has a texture similar to clay, that the atmospheric pressure was at about 1.5 times that of Earth at sea level, and that the amount of solar intensity under all that cloud layer was about one thousand times dimmer than on Earth. Among Cassini’s greatest discoveries and contributions to science has been what it discovered about Enceladus. Cassini discovered that Enceladus, an icy world, likely contains a subsurface sea after it discovered what appeared to be water geysers erupting from its surface. Cassini flew through these plumes and confirmed that they indeed were composed of water. By making this discovery, Cassini helped put Enceladus in the limelight of the scientific community as a potentially habitable moon, since there must be heat to provide the energy for the geysers and where there is water, there is a possibility of
