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Cassini
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In 1997, a spacecraft the size of a school bus was launched by JPL with a mission to explore the fascinating ringed planet Saturn and its many moons.
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Seven years and 2.2 billion miles of travel later, Cassini arrived.
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Dave Doody, Cassini Real Time Operations Lead
We are studying the atmosphere of Saturn, the rings,
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the moons, the magnetic environment, and sending all of the data back to Earth.
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Jo Pitesky, PlanetQuest Scientist and Cassini Science Planner
We have seen for the first time that there is material coming off from the surface of the moon
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and streaming out behind it, and we see that it is forming part of the rings.
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We are only finding out now how old they are, how young some of them are, did they come from an old broken up satellite?
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Are they still being regenerated? Why have they lasted so long?
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Since its arrival at Saturn in 2004, Cassini has continuously revealed the secrets of the planet and its moons.
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Scott Edgington, Cassini Scientist
So it’s really cold, and we are seeing a lot of these lakes.
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It’s really the land of lakes, more than Minnesota.The surface temperature on Titan is very very cold.
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Water ice is hard as a rock; it’s not going to be a liquid, so we know that water ice is not forming these lakes.
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However if you go back to the atmosphere, you have natural gas - methane.
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Its properties are just right, the temperatures are just right, that it condenses, forms rivers and eventually these lakes.
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Saturn, the sixth planet from the sun, is a gas giant.
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Studying Saturn, its rings and its moons will help us understand more about how our entire solar system works.
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Todd Barber, Cassini Propulsion Engineer
Saturn is like the solar system as a whole and miniature.
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You start to answer questions that we want to know about life on Earth, like how did life start here?
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How did the solar system form? You can study that on a smaller scale with Saturn.
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Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology
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