Cassini
Space probe
Facts
- Launch
- 15 October 1997
- In orbit around Saturn
- from 2004
- Huygens on Titan
- 14 January 2005
- Orbits of Saturn
- 294
- Images taken
- 453,048
- End of mission
- 15 September 2017
Cassini is a NASA probe, launched on 15 October 1997 on a mission built together with the European and Italian space agencies. After almost seven years of travel, in 2004 it became the first probe to orbit Saturn, and for thirteen years the planet was its home: in all it circled it 294 times.
It carried the European probe Huygens, which on 14 January 2005 descended for two and a half hours through Titan's atmosphere and settled on its surface, carrying on transmitting for another 72 minutes. It was the first, and so far only, landing in the outer Solar System: the farthest from Earth ever achieved.
In those thirteen years Cassini changed what we knew about Saturn and its moons. On Enceladus it discovered jets of ice and gas gushing from an ocean of liquid water hidden beneath the ice, where the ingredients for life may exist; on Titan it saw rivers of methane flowing into a sea of methane; and around the planet it found six new moons.
In April 2017, almost out of fuel, it began the Grand Finale: 22 orbits that took it through the gap of about 2000 km between the planet and its rings. On 15 September 2017 NASA sent it deliberately into Saturn's atmosphere, so that it could never contaminate Enceladus and Titan, where life might be searched for in the future. It kept sending data to the very end, for as long as it could keep its antenna pointed at Earth.
The way it explored Saturn lives on: the orbital path of Europa Clipper, on its way to Jupiter, is based on Cassini's.