NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has sighted Saturn

The Cassini Imaging Team today is releasing a color composite image of
Saturn and its moon, Titan, 20 months before the Cassini spacecraft arrives
at the planet.

The image is available online from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA02884 and from the Cassini
Imaging Team’s University of Arizona site at http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu
The image shows the shadow of the planet falling across its famous rings and
includes Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.

The planet was 285 million kilometers (177 million miles) from the
spacecraft when the images were taken last week, nearly twice the distance
between Earth and the Sun. The spacecraft has now crossed more than half the
distance to Saturn from Jupiter, its last rendezvous.

“Cassini has sighted the ringed planet looking distant, mysterious and
serene,” said Carolyn Porco, a planetary scientist at Southwest Research
Institute in Boulder, Colo., and leader of the science team using the
Cassini camera.

Cassini camera-team member Alfred McEwen at the University of Arizona,
Tucson, added, “Seeing the picture makes our science-planning work suddenly
seem more real. Now we can see Saturn and we’ll watch it get bigger as a
visual cue that we’re approaching fast. It’s good to see the camera is
working well.”

Dennis Matson, Cassini project scientist at JPL in Pasadena, Calif., said,
“This is an emotional event for the mission. We now have Saturn in our
sights.”

The 14-member NASA-selected imaging science team will use the camera to
investigate many features of Saturn, its moons and its rings. Cassini will
begin a four-year prime mission in orbit around Saturn when it arrives on
July 1, 2004. It will release a piggybacked probe, Huygens, to descend
through the thick atmosphere of Titan on Jan. 14, 2005.

Cassini-Huygens is a cooperative mission of NASA, the European Space Agency
and the Italian Space Agency. Additional information about it is available
online at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov JPL, a division of the California
Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Office
of Space Science, Washington, D.C.

Many UA planetary scientists and their students are directly involved in the
Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn.

In addition to McEwen, they include:

• Robert H. Brown, team leader for the Visual and Infrared Mapping
  Spectrometer (VIMS)
• Jonathan I. Lunine, interdisciplinary scientist for the Cassini mission
• Martin Tomasko, principal investigator for the Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer (DISR) that will be deployed to the surface of Titan on the Huygens probe
• Peter Smith, co-investigator on DISR
• Ralph Lorenz, member of the Cassini Radar Team and co-investigator on the Surface Science Package on the Huygens probe
• Donald Hunten, co-investigator on the Gas Chromatograph and Mass Spectrometer on the Huygens probe
• * Roger Yelle, team member for the Ion Neutral Mass Spectrometer