By Xinhua,
Beijing : Finished with its four-year primary mission to Saturn, the Cassini orbiter has turned its cameras upon the ringed planet’s mysterious moons as it kicks off a two-year extended mission.
The primary mission began when the spacecraft entered Saturnian orbit on July 1, 2004. Cassini produced the first pictures that pierced the haze surrounding Titan, Saturn’s biggest moon. The orbiter also sent down a European-built piggyback lander called Huygens, which beamed back pictures from Titan’s surface. The Cassini-Huygens observations revealed that Titan was laced with hydrocarbon seas and channels.
“We’ve had a wonderful mission and a very eventful one in terms of the scientific discoveries we’ve made, and yet an uneventful one when it comes to the spacecraft behaving so well,” Bob Mitchell, Cassini program manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement. “We are incredibly proud to have completed all of the objectives we set out to accomplish when we launched. We answered old questions and raised quite a few new ones, and so our journey continues.”
Cassini also discovered geysers of ice spewing from Enceladus, another Saturnian moon that may harbor subsurface oceans and perhaps even life.
Titan and Enceladus are the primary targets for Cassini’s extended mission, which NASA approved in April. Cassini will also monitor seasonal effects on Titan and Saturn, explore Saturn’s magnetic field and witness Saturn’s equinox on Aug. 11, 2009, when sunlight will pass directly through the plane of the planet’s rings.
The spacecraft’s new agenda has been dubbed the Cassini Equinox Mission in honor of the astronomical event, which occurs roughly every 15 years.
Cassini’s 3.3 billion U.S. dollar primary mission was funded by NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. NASA is picking up the bill for the 160 million dollar extension. Officials have said the mission could be extended yet again if Cassini was still in good working order in mid-2010.