Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn Part I

I think you might enjoy this two part series I wrote on the Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn. Enjoy!Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn was a culmination of nearly two decades of research and cooperation between the European Space Agency and NASA. These two space agencies were able to pool their resources to create the Cassini Spacecraft that went to Saturn and the Huygens Probe that separated from the Cassini to explore the the atmosphere and surface of the Saturn moon of Titan. This mission has provided us with more information about Saturn and the moon Titan.

The moon Titan has always evoked curiosity among astronomers and the public alike. Before the Cassini-Huygens Mission, little was known about the moon. In fact, the moon because of its clouds and relative large size, was once thought to be possibly have life.

The Cassini Spacecraft, after a long arduous journey that saw it slingshot past the planets of Venus and Earth in order to gain enough momentum to propel it to Saturn, had its first flyby of the moon Titan on July 2nd, 2004. This was a very distant flyby at 211,000 miles away. Nonetheless, it offered some of the best images of the moon that had ever been received up until this time. The images showed polar clouds composed of methane and widely varied topographical features.

In October of 2004, the Cassini Spacecraft had the first of 45 close flybys of the moon Titan. These close flybys allowed an extremely large amount of data to be collected about Titan and sent back to monitoring sites on Earth. These large amounts of data included the very first radar images of the surface. They showed the surface was more or less flat and that liquid did not exist on the surface.

Continued on Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn Part II