04 sept 2006 After an epic journey of seven a few years 3.5 billion kms, The
Cassini spacecraft passed through Saturn orbit on 1 July 2004.The cassini
huygens objective is a $3 billion, 4 year look of saturn, its rings lots of its
40 odd known moons.No other spacecraft had been near the solar system's second
largest planet since voyager flybys of the 1980s. Delivered in october 1997, the
joint us european spacecraft is the largest and most stylish interplanetary
vessel ever built.Cassini weighs as much as an adult male african elephant and
is around how big the a 30 seater school bus. The most Pandora UK 2014 stunning highlight of the
mission so far is its visit to titan, saturn's hightest capacity moon.Esa's
huygens probe premiered by cassini and descended through the dense atmosphere of
titan in january 2005.It took over as first probe to land on such a distant
world. Huygens discovered a noticeably earth like landscape of hills and
branching valleys, though the peaks are ice and the irregular rivers carry
liquid methane.Cassini has additionally seen clouds and old shorelines, or
perhaps evidence for deserts, an ice volcano and remedy for paralysis lake of
methane near the south pole.But we have seen no sign of the methane seas or
oceans once expected. Retinue along with moons A developer work error meant that
cassini missed some transmissions from huygens, but a network of radio
telescopes on earth managed to grab the weak signal directly, restoring data
from the wind experiment which showed a peculiar calm layer in the
atmosphere.Methane monsoons may even lash the image surface of titan. Titan's
hazy atmosphere holds many of the chemical associated with the early earth,
regarding complex organic chemicals detected by huygens, and it may offer clues
to how life that is first evolved.Some scientific study has even speculated that
titan itself may harbour life, but most believe that it is too cold. Among
saturn's other good moons, cassini has seen volcanic vents on enceladus being
spewing out water vapour, performing its fuzzy e ring.The first distant flyby of
iapetus revealed a mysterious ridge playing around that moon's equator.The outer
moon phoebe was shown to be an interloper from the kuiper belt near the solar
system. Cassini's illustrations or photos of hyperion show a moon scarred with
deep black pits, while dione bears long cracks and breaks, perhaps an indication
of ancient volcanism.Tethys has a 50 km long, spear like possess.While
diminutive mimas bares an uncanny similarity to the death star the planet
destroying space station from the movie star wars. And also buzzing the known
moons, cassini has discovered a few tiny new inner geostationary satellites.But
many experts have outdone by astronomers using telescopes on earth, who revealed
twelve new moons, these individuals small, unusual and far from saturn. The
ringed world Cassini has found complex and dynamic new support frames in
saturn's rings of ice, which included spiral Pandora Charms UK
waves, clumpy, messy spokes, and lines called wakes.The rings are a model of the
disc of material that ornamented the early sun and formed the planets, so
studying this product could tell scientists about how our solar system evolved.
Other findings show that the ring particles heat up and cool down rapidly,
hinting likely fluffy more like snow than ice cubes.In the mean time cassini's
cameras have seen the outer f ring pulled into streamers by the moons prometheus
and pandora. On the ringed the our planet itself, cassini has revealed saturn's
twinkling aurora and detected fierce, unreliable thunderstorms, on"Superbolts"Of
super, quite unlike the more foreseeable storms seen by the voyager
probes.Weather may have changed because the rings are now shading saturn more
evenly, whereas noisy.1980s they were edge on to the Sun, Putting precisely the
equator in deep shadow. Saturn's magnetic field actually is rotating slightly
slower than it did two decades ago when voyager visited, implying that it isn't
as rigidly fixed to the environment as earth's field.More observations of the
magnetic and gravitational fields could reveal the inner structure of saturn.
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