The beginning of Cassini’s final year at Saturn
Link here. The article does a nice job of outlining, with videos, what will happen as the spacecraft makes multiple dives inside rings.
Cassini’s final acts, which will play out over the next year. That pass placed Cassini in a high-inclination orbit tilted 60° relative to the ring plane. Cassini will perform 20 passes just 620 miles (1000 kilometers) outside the F ring of Saturn in a phase known as the Ring-Grazing Orbits, which runs from late November 2016 through April 2017.
Cassini already reached apoapse, or its farthest point from Saturn, on Wednesday, November 30th. The first ring crossing is coming right up this weekend on Sunday, December 4th, at 7:09 a.m. EST / 13:09 UT. During the first periapse pass on Sunday, Cassini will also burn its main engine for the 183rd and final time for the mission. All later fine course corrections will be made using thrusters only.
Things get even more interesting after April, when the series of Grand Finale Orbits will begin, taking the spacecraft through the 1240-mile-wide (2000-kilometer-wide) gap between the planet’s cloud tops and rings for 22 final orbits. The Grand Finale Orbits start with the spacecraft’s 126th and final pass near Titan, which will set the spacecraft up for much tighter final orbits.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Link here. The article does a nice job of outlining, with videos, what will happen as the spacecraft makes multiple dives inside rings.
Cassini’s final acts, which will play out over the next year. That pass placed Cassini in a high-inclination orbit tilted 60° relative to the ring plane. Cassini will perform 20 passes just 620 miles (1000 kilometers) outside the F ring of Saturn in a phase known as the Ring-Grazing Orbits, which runs from late November 2016 through April 2017.
Cassini already reached apoapse, or its farthest point from Saturn, on Wednesday, November 30th. The first ring crossing is coming right up this weekend on Sunday, December 4th, at 7:09 a.m. EST / 13:09 UT. During the first periapse pass on Sunday, Cassini will also burn its main engine for the 183rd and final time for the mission. All later fine course corrections will be made using thrusters only.
Things get even more interesting after April, when the series of Grand Finale Orbits will begin, taking the spacecraft through the 1240-mile-wide (2000-kilometer-wide) gap between the planet’s cloud tops and rings for 22 final orbits. The Grand Finale Orbits start with the spacecraft’s 126th and final pass near Titan, which will set the spacecraft up for much tighter final orbits.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
After Pluto and that weird comet, the rings of Saturn will be the grand finale of planetary missions, especially in terms of visuals for us in the general public. This is a guarantee for more investments in planetary exploration.
Btw, PEOTUS in the first speech of his thank-you tour, in Cincinnati, just lauded the American people, reading from the prompter, for having put a man on the Moon “and satellites all over space”. 5 minutes from the end of that speech.
LocalFluff–
Good stuff.
You do enjoy DJT, way toooo much! (You realize we don’t have a Prime Minister & Congress isn’t Parliament…)
I did re-watch the PEOTUS speech segment you referenced; that was a definite nod to “space & science technology,” man-on-the-moon, the whole-enchilada (if I’m still allowed to say that) to be sure.
He was 100% on-prompter & it sounded extremely positive.
Nebulous & Vague, but very laudable & presented well, & it was in-the-prompter—he definitely has his ‘people’ going over the NASA budget.
Back to Science– excellent timely Jet Propulsion Lab overview on Cassini.
Project Manager & a Project Scientist. Good visuals & techie-data
Cassini: Epic Journey at Saturn, Science Highlights & the Grand Finale
JPL Public presentation
September 22, 2016
https://youtu.be/YchCuFvyAZ4
I think that a rover on Io would be a profitable investment for planetary science. Watching volcanic eruption in that colorful landscape would be spectacular. Saturn is hard to beat when it comes to making space exploration popular, but Io could do it. Jupiter is colorful too, which I hope Juno will manage to show us on December 11.