Cassini_Mission3_Graphic_NYT.jpg

The New York Times has an interesting piece on the machinations required to extend the Cassini probe for another 7 year mission at Saturn.

With only 22% of it’s original fuel left, getting the probe around the Saturn system’s 53 moons, the rings, and the planet itself – without coming so close as to hit anything – “… present[s] an astonishingly complex exercise in Keplerian physics and geometry. The enormous array of science objectives and targets — moons, rings, Saturn itself — makes it one of the most complex missions ever flown. …

‘Without Titan,’ Mr. Seal [Cassini’s mission planning supervisor] said, ‘we would go into one orbit around Saturn and be stuck there.’ Thus Titan, in the argot of orbital mechanics, is Cassini’s ‘tour engine.’ [T]he final ‘reference trajectory’ … now includes 56 passes over Titan, 155 orbits of Saturn in different inclinations, 12 flybys of Enceladus, 5 flybys of other large moons — and final destruction.”

Click the image to see the full sized graphic.

Cassini’s Next 7 Years
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