Za niecały już rok 15 września 2017 zaplanowano destrukcyjne zakończenie misji Cassiniego.
Jednak finalne orbity pozwolą poznać pierścienie Saturna lepiej, jak też samą planetę, zbliżając się na odległość zaledwie 3800 km od wierzchołków chmur planety olbrzyma. Orbity Sondy Cassini w czasie ostatniej fazy naukowej misji będą przypominać orbity sondy Juno obiegającej Jowisza.
A zaczęło się w 1975, kiedy to raport Space Science Board amerykańskiej National Research Council i jego Committee on Planetary and Lunar Exploration zalecił głębsze zbadanie układu Saturna.
W 1982 roku Space Science Committee należący do European Science Foundation i amerykański Space Science Board utworzyły wspólną grupę roboczą, której zadaniem było zbadanie możliwości współpracy pomiędzy Stanami Zjednoczonymi i Europą w dziedzinie badań planetarnych. W rezultacie, w listopadzie 1982 roku, europejscy naukowcy D. Gautier i W. Ip przedłożyli ESA propozycję misji złożonej z orbitera Saturna i próbnika Tytana, jednocześnie sugerując przeprowadzenie jej we współpracy z NASA. W styczniu 1983 roku amerykański Solar System Exploration Committee zarekomendował NASA przeprowadzenie misji na Tytana (Titan Probe-Radar Mapper) z możliwością dołączenia do niej orbitera Saturna.
https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini-HuygensThe final year is going to be an exciting one. On November 29, a flyby of Titan will drop Cassini's closest approach to Saturn to a point just 10,000 kilometers beyond the F ring. Cassini will be able to study the weird phenomena of Saturn's rings and ringmoons closer than ever before, and will travel to never-before-sampled regions of Saturn's magnetic field. Then, on April 22, 2017, a final targeted flyby of Titan will shift Cassini's periapsis to a point between the innermost D ring and Saturn. On each close approach to Saturn, it'll fly within 3800 kilometers of the cloud tops. Cassini will see the planet, rings, and energetic particle environment from a new perspective, and have the first ever opportunity to measure the masses of the ring system and Saturn separately. A final nudge by distant Titan on September 15, 2017, will send Cassini to its death.
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2016/09150727-one-year-remains-in-cassini.htmlhttp://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6623http://www.pulskosmosu.pl/2016/09/17/sonda-cassini-rozpoczyna-ostatni-rok-pracy-przy-saturnie/It’s been eight years since Cassini’s tour of Saturn was supposed to have ended, 19 years since it left Earth, and more than two decades since most of its electronics were assembled (so long ago that smartphones and MP3 players didn’t exist, and the Internet was a novelty). The mission has been extended twice, and still the data flows in from Saturn.(...)
Some things have turned out better than expected. The spacecraft’s solid-state recorders, for instance, “should be shot through with holes [damaged storage cells] by now from radiation,” says Earl Maize, Cassini’s program manager at JPL, yet they’re practically as good as new. The Huygens probe continued to transmit data from the surface of Titan longer than anyone predicted. When I suggest that Cassini might best be named the Serendipitous Mission, Maize balks. “We tend to call it planning,” he says.
The project began, as many space missions do, with a simple idea: Send a spacecraft to orbit Saturn—not just to zoom past quickly, but to stick around the neighborhood and explore the planet and its moons thoroughly. The year was 1982. Ronald Reagan was in the White House, the space shuttle was new, and the summer before, Voyager 2 had rushed by the planet, its rings, and moons, returning hundreds of close-ups of Saturn.
The Voyager images and data were spectacular, and they increased the scientists’ appetite. The Galileo mission to orbit Jupiter was already in the works. Why not do the same thing for Saturn? From the beginning, it was agreed that the mission should be international—the “most intimate and intricate” such collaboration to date, according to Jonathan Lunine of Cornell University, an interdisciplinary scientist working on the mission. Some 19 nations joined the project, along with the European and Italian space agencies.
http://www.airspacemag.com/flight-today/team-cassini-180960062/Misja Cassiniego w liczbach po 12 latach od wejścia na orbitę wokół Saturna:
https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/resources/7501/
Wątek: Cassini (Przeczytany 276772 razy)