Related Research Articles
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is a federally funded research and development center in La Cañada Flintridge, California, United States. Founded in 1936 by Caltech researchers, the laboratory is now owned and sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and administered and managed by the California Institute of Technology.
Voyager 2 is a space probe launched by NASA on August 20, 1977, as a part of the Voyager program. It was launched on a trajectory toward the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn and enabled further encounters with the ice giants Uranus and Neptune. It remains the only spacecraft to have visited either of the ice giant planets, and was the third of five spacecraft to achieve Solar escape velocity, which will allow it to leave the Solar System. It has been sending scientific data to Earth for 46 years, 9 months, 2 days, making it the oldest active space probe. Launched 16 days before its twin Voyager 1, the primary mission of the spacecraft was to study the outer planets and its extended mission is to study interstellar space beyond the Sun's heliosphere.
Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second-largest in the Solar System, after Jupiter. It is a gas giant with an average radius of about nine-and-a-half times that of Earth. It has only one-eighth the average density of Earth, but is over 95 times more massive. Even though Saturn is nearly the size of Jupiter, Saturn has less than one-third of Jupiter's mass. Saturn orbits the Sun at a distance of 9.59 AU (1,434 million km) with an orbital period of 29.45 years.
Cassini–Huygens, commonly called Cassini, was a space-research mission by NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Italian Space Agency (ASI) to send a space probe to study the planet Saturn and its system, including its rings and natural satellites. The Flagship-class robotic spacecraft comprised both NASA's Cassini space probe and ESA's Huygens lander, which landed on Saturn's largest moon, Titan. Cassini was the fourth space probe to visit Saturn and the first to enter its orbit, where it stayed from 2004 to 2017. The two craft took their names from the astronomers Giovanni Cassini and Christiaan Huygens.
Mimas, also designated Saturn I, is the seventh-largest natural satellite of Saturn. With a mean diameter of 396.4 kilometres or 246.3 miles, Mimas is the smallest astronomical body known to be roughly rounded in shape due to its own gravity. Mimas's low density, 1.15 g/cm3, indicates that it is composed mostly of water ice with only a small amount of rock, and study of Mimas's motion suggests that it may have a liquid ocean beneath its surface ice. The surface of Mimas is heavily cratered and shows little signs of recent geological activity. A notable feature of Mimas's surface is Herschel, one of the largest craters relative to the size of the parent body in the Solar System. Herschel measures 139 kilometres across, about one-third of Mimas's mean diameter, and formed from an extremely energetic impact event. The crater's name is derived from the discoverer of Mimas, William Herschel, in 1789. The moon's presence has created one of the largest 'gaps' in Saturn's ring, named the Cassini Division, due to orbital resonance destabilizing the particles' orbit there.
This article provides a timeline of the Cassini–Huygens mission. Cassini was a collaboration between the United States' NASA, the European Space Agency ("ESA"), and the Italian Space Agency ("ASI") to send a probe to study the Saturnian system, including the planet, its rings, and its natural satellites. The Flagship-class uncrewed robotic spacecraft comprised both NASA's Cassini probe, and ESA's Huygens lander which was designed to land on Saturn's largest moon, Titan. Cassini was the fourth space probe to visit Saturn and the first to enter its orbit. The craft were named after astronomers Giovanni Cassini and Christiaan Huygens.
Carolyn C. Porco is an American planetary scientist who explores the outer Solar System, beginning with her imaging work on the Voyager missions to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune in the 1980s. She led the imaging science team on the Cassini mission in orbit around Saturn. She is an expert on planetary rings and the Saturnian moon, Enceladus.
The Space Science Institute (SSI) in Boulder, Colorado, is a nonprofit, public-benefit corporation formed in 1992. Its purpose is to create and maintain an environment where scientific research and education programs can flourish in an integrated fashion. SSI is among the four non-profit institutes in the US cited in a 2007 report by Nature, including Southwest Research Institute, Planetary Science Institute, and Eureka Scientific, which manage federal grants for non-tenure-track astronomers.
The exploration of Saturn has been solely performed by crewless probes. Three missions were flybys, which formed an extended foundation of knowledge about the system. The Cassini–Huygens spacecraft, launched in 1997, was in orbit from 2004 to 2017.
Neptune has been directly explored by one space probe, Voyager 2, in 1989. As of 2024, there are no confirmed future missions to visit the Neptunian system, although a tentative Chinese mission has been planned for launch in 2024. NASA, ESA, and independent academic groups have proposed future scientific missions to visit Neptune. Some mission plans are still active, while others have been abandoned or put on hold.
Edward Carroll Stone is an American space scientist, professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology, and former director of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
Michele Karen Dougherty is a Professor of Space Physics at Imperial College London. She is leading unmanned exploratory missions to Saturn and Jupiter and is Principal Investigator for J-MAG – a magnetometer for the European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, launched in April 2023.
Charles Kohlhase worked for forty years at NASA/JPL leading the design of several robotic deep-space planetary missions. He is also an author, game developer and lecturer.
The Cassini space probe was deliberately disposed of via a controlled fall into Saturn's atmosphere on September 15, 2017, ending its nearly two-decade-long mission. This method was chosen to prevent biological contamination of any of the moons of Saturn now thought to offer potentially habitable environments. Factors that influenced the mission end method included the amount of rocket fuel left, the health of the spacecraft, and funding for operations on Earth.
Bonnie J. Buratti is an American planetary scientist in the Division of Earth and Space Sciences at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where she leads the Comets, Asteroids, and Satellites Group. Her research involves the composition and physical properties of planetary surfaces, and volatile transport in the outer solar system.
Amanda R. Hendrix is an American planetary scientist known for her pioneering studies of solar system bodies at ultraviolet wavelengths. She is a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute. Her research interests include moon and asteroid surface composition, space weathering effects and radiation products. She is a co-investigator on the Cassini UVIS instrument, was a co-investigator on the Galileo UVS instrument, is a Participating Scientist on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter LAMP instrument and is a Principal Investigator on Hubble Space Telescope observing programs. As of 2019, she is also the co-lead of the NASA Roadmaps to Oceans World Group.
Athena Coustenis is an astrophysicist specializing in planetology. Dr. Coustenis, a French national, is director of research, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, at LESIA, at the Paris Observatory, Meudon. She is involved in several space mission projects for the European Space Agency (ESA) and for NASA. Her focus is on gas giant planets Saturn, Jupiter and their moons, and she is considered a foremost expert on Saturn's moon Titan.
Carrie Anderson is an American planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
Amy Simon is an American planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, involved in several missions of the Solar System Exploration Program.
Candice Joy Hansen-Koharcheck is a planetary scientist. She is responsible for the development and operation of the JunoCam, for which she received the NASA's Outstanding Public Leadership Medal in 2018.
References
- 1 2 "Linda Spilker". IMDb.
- 1 2 3 4 5 "Linda Spilker". science.jpl.nasa.gov.
- 1 2 "NASA's Cassini Begins Its Final Mission Before Self-Destruction". NPR.org. April 5, 2017.
- 1 2 "NASA's Cassini Mission Conducts Daring Dive through Saturn's Rings". Scientific American. April 26, 2017.
- 1 2 "Saturn ruled this scientist's life for 40 years — here's why she needs NASA to go back after Cassini's death". Business Insider. September 17, 2017.
- 1 2 Kaplan, Sarah (September 14, 2017). "Cassini was the mission of a lifetime for this NASA scientist. Now she must say goodbye". Washington Post.
- ↑ Meltzer, Michael (2015). The Cassini-Huygens Visit to Saturn: An Historic Mission to the Ringed Planet. Springer. p. 287. ISBN 978-3-319-07607-2.
- ↑ Spilker, Linda. "JPL Science: Linda Spilker". science.jpl.nasa.gov. Retrieved February 17, 2024.
- 1 2 "Linda Spilker, planetary scientist". scicom.ucsc.edu.
- ↑ Spilker, Linda, ed. (1997). Passage to a ringed world : the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan (PDF). National Aeronautics and Space Administration SP-533.
- ↑ "NASA Agency Honor Awards" (PDF). 2013. p. 25.
