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Cassini Spacecraft to Glide Over Icy Saturn Moon
By SPACE.com Staff
posted: 27 April 2010
05:15 pm ET
The Cassini spacecraft exploring Saturn will get a new taste of the ringed planet's moon Enceladus late Tuesday when it flies over the icy satellite in a gravity experiment.
NASA's Cassini probe will glide low over Enceladus tonight to perform an experiment designed to probe the moon's interior composition. At closest approach, Cassini will be flying just 60 miles (100 km) above the surface of Enceladus at a speed of 15,000 mph relative to the moon.
The flyby, which will take Cassini through the water-rich plume flaring out from Enceladus' south polar region, will occur on April 27 at 8:10:17 p.m. EDT (0010:17 GMT on April 28).
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Wallpapers.Smileycentral.comScientists plan to use Cassini's radio science instrument to measure the gravitational pull of Enceladus against the steady radio link to NASA's Deep Space Network here on Earth. Detecting any changes will help scientists understand what lies beneath Enceladus' famous "tiger stripe" fractures, which spew water vapor and organic particles from the moon's south polar region.
The experiment is also expected to help scientists learn if the south polar region's sub-surface resembles a lava lamp. Scientists have hypothesized that a bubble of warmer ice periodically travels up to the crust and repaves it, explaining the quirky heat behavior and intriguing surface features of this region.
The Cassini probe launched in 1997 and arrived at Saturn in 2004, where it dropped the European Huygens probe on the cloudy surface of the planet's largest moon Titan. Cassini was slated to be decommissioned in September of this year, but has received an extended mission that now runs through 2017.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. It is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
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