Some great news for the science set!

Cassini Mission Status Report

12.24.04


The European Space Agency's Huygens probe successfully detached from NASA's Cassini orbiter today to begin a three-week journey to Saturn's moon Titan. NASA's Deep Space Network tracking stations in Madrid, Spain, and Goldstone, Calif., received the signal at 7:24 p.m. (PST). All systems performed as expected and there were no problems reported with the Cassini spacecraft.

I was actually caught by surprise by a story today that the Cassini craft had a planned main engine firing to adjust course. This course adjustment was to keep the main spacecraft from following the Huygens probe into the atmosphere of Titan.

I have been very closely following the progress of the Cassini mission since its Orbital Insertion maneuver earlier this year. Ijust seemed to think that the Huygens probe seperation was still some time in the future. (I guess it technically still is but it is much closer than I had thought!) At any rate, the day to be watching for is Jan 14th 2005. This will be the time that Huygens falls into the thick atmosphere of the far-away moon Titan. It is expected to take pictures and a large number of detailed scientific readings and send all of the data back to Cassini before it is finally destroyed by the impact on Titan.

I for one am very excited. This mission, one that eschewed the "new NASA" ideal of "Faster Cheaper" relied on good old fashioned precision and fantastic engineering to arrive at Saturn. It has been possibly the most flawless missions in the last 10 years and for that I applaud the teams that have build and programmed the spacecraft. These days we are gettting used to having missions lost and damaged by all types of operational errors. I have been very happy to have so much great data and imagery to look at from this one.

Please take a look for yourselves. JPL Has all of your mission questions answered!