A couple of weeks ago I wrote about my first experience covering a planetary mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1981. It was Saturn, and in a great deja vu experience, 23 years later, I’m watching from the comfort of my home office while another mission prepares to explore Saturn in greater depth. It’s not nearly as heart-pounding (for me, anyway), but for the mission planners who have been waiting for 7 years for this moment, it is astoundingly exciting, the chance of a lifetime to study Saturn. The Saturn image here was taken a couple of days ago and it brings all those memories back… and entices us to imagine what the next months of exploration will bring us. Stay tuned!
Way back when I was a kid I saw a picture of Saturn in a Time-Life book. That image embodied all the ideas I had about space travel at that time (which I admit were inflamed by the astronauts going up in the Gemini capsules and orbiting the Earth). Saturn was cool and remote and just about the most fascinating place I could think of. I remember wondering about those rings — what were they made of? Could we fly through them?
Some years later as a newspaper writer I covered the Voyager 2/Saturn encounter and learned more about this wonderful planet than I ever thought possible. So, it’s with a great deal of interest I watch out for Cassini mission images as this last of the grand explorers makes its way closer to the ringed planet. Early last month, Cassini delivered this image back to waiting mission scientists. You can make out ring features, the cloud-tops, and one of the planet’s moons. Cassini will arrive at its destination next July (2004) and settle into a circular orbit ideal for study and mapping. Later, it will send the Huygens probe to the surface of Titan, giving us a great look (we hope) at what’s hiding beneath the clouds that shroud the moon from our view. It’s been long time since we’ve had a probe out at Saturn (since 1981, actually). I can’t wait to see what we find this time!
