Cassini/Huygens Mission to the Saturn System
Launched in 1997, the Cassini-Huygens mission set off to explore the Saturn system. After spending 6 years and 261 days travelling between Earth and Saturn, it arrived in Saturn’s orbit in 2004, where it spent the next 13 years before crashing into Saturn in 2017. The mission consisted of an American orbiter named Cassini, which was designed to explore Saturn and its moons and a European lander called Huygens which was used to land on Titan, one of Saturn’s many moons, also a very likely place for life to exist outside of the Earth, Huygens took and relayed 350 pictures of Titan’s surface. This essay will touch on Cassini’s challenges and achievements and also the legacy it left behind.
Cassini
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Cassini’s onboard magnetometer (an instrument which measurers magnetism) first detected an unusual pattern in that Enceladus was producing some sort of interference with Saturn’s magnetic field, which meant “Enceladus was likely giving off gases that was generated from the moon’s surface or its interior”. With a follow up flyby, Cassini discovered that Enceladus was an active moon that possesses a salt water ocean and active hydrothermal vents beneath its surface. It also ejects streams of ice and other organic particles such as hydrocarbons from its south pole, which forms a layer of Saturn’s ring. With the discovery of these unique properties on Enceladus, it had made Enceladus a highly likely celestial body to host extra-terrestrial …show more content…
In previously thought impossible places to host life (so far away from the Sun and the resultant cold temperature), the ingredients of life such as liquid water, organic compounds and a source of energy was discovered by Cassini to be present on the moons of Saturn (Enceladus and Titan). Based on data provided by Cassini/Huygens, some researchers think life “as we don’t know it” could exist on Titan’s surface and Enceladus’s underground liquid ocean certainly is another place to look for life. With its twenty years of service, Cassini/Huygens fundamentally changed the way scientists look for life by introducing new conditions that could host life and in previously thought impossible