August is shaping up to be quite the month for space fans. The Perseid Meteor Shower is peaking this weekend. SpaceX is preparing for another ISS resupply mission. A total solar eclipse will stretch across the entire continental U.S. And
August is shaping up to be quite the month for space fans. The Perseid Meteor Shower is peaking this weekend. SpaceX is preparing for another ISS resupply mission. A total solar eclipse will stretch across the entire continental U.S. And NASA’s Cassini spacecraft is about to get a taste of Saturn’s atmosphere.
The folks who have shepherded Cassini since its launch nearly 20 years ago are getting ready for the spacecraft’s final five orbits of the ringed gas giant. Next Monday (August 14), Cassini will cruise just over 1,000 miles above Saturn’s cloud tops.
Cassini won’t be just a Saturn orbiter probe anymore. “Cassini will become the first Saturn atmospheric probe,” says Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at JPL. “It’s long been a goal in planetary exploration to send a dedicated probe into the atmosphere of Saturn, and we’re laying the groundwork for future exploration with this foray.”
Cassini might need a little more than gravity for this close flyby over Saturn’s clouds. The team piloting Cassini expect to fly through a dense enough portion of Saturn’s atmosphere to fire the spacecraft’s small thrusters to keep it stable.
This won’t be the first time Cassini has fired its thrusters during a close atmosphere flyby. In June 2010, Cassini flew just 457 miles above Saturn’s moon Titan. The thrusters on board fired about twice as much as the team expected them to. Through it all, Cassini kept pointing the way the team expected it to. And the extra thrusting stayed comfortably within the safety margin.
The June 2010 flyby experience is helping the team set Cassini’s trajectory for Monday’s flyby. “Thanks to our past experience, the team is confident that we under