Solar System
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Cassini at Saturn
Oct 06, 2006
An update on Cassini's recent flyby of Saturn's moon Titan. Two lakes were discovered, along with other science data.
Transcript:
Hi. I'm Candace Hansen.
I’m one of the Cassini scientists and we just had another flyby of Titan on September 23rd.
This time our science goal was to dip into the atmosphere and get a sample.
And it’s a little nerve-wracking because when you go down deep in the atmosphere there’s always a little chance we could actually lose control of the orientation of the spacecraft.
If we lose this orientation of the spacecraft, it’s fine. But we don’t collect all of the science data that we intended because our instruments are not pointed in the direction that we wanted.
But we were fine the spacecraft came through just fine and we got great data. And we’ve learned that Titan’s upper atmosphere has about 10 times as many different molecules as a similar level on the Earth.
And we also got a little sample of radar data as we flew by and found 2 more lakes.
We will have another flyby, October 9th and that one will be focused on radar so we expect to get a long swath with lots and lots of lakes.
I’m Candace Hansen with the Cassini Flyby Report.
I’m one of the Cassini scientists and we just had another flyby of Titan on September 23rd.
This time our science goal was to dip into the atmosphere and get a sample.
And it’s a little nerve-wracking because when you go down deep in the atmosphere there’s always a little chance we could actually lose control of the orientation of the spacecraft.
If we lose this orientation of the spacecraft, it’s fine. But we don’t collect all of the science data that we intended because our instruments are not pointed in the direction that we wanted.
But we were fine the spacecraft came through just fine and we got great data. And we’ve learned that Titan’s upper atmosphere has about 10 times as many different molecules as a similar level on the Earth.
And we also got a little sample of radar data as we flew by and found 2 more lakes.
We will have another flyby, October 9th and that one will be focused on radar so we expect to get a long swath with lots and lots of lakes.
I’m Candace Hansen with the Cassini Flyby Report.