The Cassini-Huygens Visit to Saturn: An Historic Mission to the Ringed Planet (Springer Praxis Books)

The Cassini-Huygens Visit to Saturn: An Historic Mission to the Ringed Planet (Springer Praxis Books)

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Cassini-Huygens was the most ambitious and successful space journey ever launched to the outer Solar System. This book examines all aspects of the journey: its conception and planning the lengthy political processes needed to make it a reality the engineering and development required to build the spacecraft its 2.2-billion milejourney from Earth to the Ringed Planet and the amazing discoveriesfrom the mission.The author traces how the visions of a few brilliant scientists matured, gained popularity and eventually became a reality.Innovative technical leaps were necessary to assemble such a multifaceted spacecraft and reliably operate it while it orbited a planet so far from our own. The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft design evolved from other deep space efforts, most notably the Galileo mission to Jupiter, enabling the voluminous, paradigm-shifting scientific data collected by the spacecraft.Some of these discoveries are absolute gems. A small satellite that scientists once thought of as a dead piece of rock turned out to contain a warm underground sea that could conceivably harbor life. And we now know that hiding under the mist of Saturn s largest moon, Titan, is a world with lakes, fluvial channels, and dunes hauntingly reminiscent of those on our own planet, except that on Titan, it s not water that fills those lakes but hydrocarbons. These and other breakthroughs illustrate why the Cassini-Huygens mission will be remembered as one of greatest voyages ofdiscovery ever made.