Cassini continues to orbit Saturn.
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NASA presents a four-day animation of images taken by their Cassini probe, which, just this week, started its previous year orbiting Saturn.
NASA’s Cassini probe was sent to observe Saturn and its moons, and besides taking incredible images, it spends a great deal of time studying Titan’s atmosphere.
Although, Pan may be very small and appears like a walnut sized object orbiting within the Encke Gap in Saturn’s A Ring but it is very important for the preservation of Rings as it keeps them apart and acts as a shepherd by maintaining the Encke Gap free of ring particles.
Starting on November 30, Cassini’s orbit will send it just past the edge of Saturn’s main rings. In the last twelve years, it has accomplished the first landing outside of our Solar System (on Saturn’s moon Titan in 2005), found evidence of a subsurface ocean on Enceladus, and sent back countless photos and videos of Saturn and its unbelievable rings. Cassini will approach to within 4,850 miles (7,800 kilometers) of the center of the narrow F ring, with its odd kinked and braided structure. The spacecraft will then shoot the gap between the innermost ring and the planet’s atmosphere to measure Saturn’s gravitational fields and even sample its outer atmosphere.
“It’s like getting a whole new mission”, said Spilker. This will enable the spacecraft to leap over the rings with a final flyby of Titan in April 2017, to begin the Grand Finale.
“We’ve used Titan’s gravity throughout the mission to sling Cassini around the Saturn system”, said Earl Maize, Cassini project manager at JPL. Friction with the atmosphere will cause the spacecraft to burn up like a meteor soon afterward. The movie will cover just about four Saturn rotations.
The problem is, in both of these instances – back when Voyager 1 spotted its cloud and when Cassini spied the more recent one – the spacecraft’s instrument didn’t detect enough of dicyanoacetylene vapour present to account for the cloud’s formation. In one year, the long-lasting mission will finally come to an end when Cassini-Huygens enters Saturn’s atmosphere, destroying itself instantly.
Since the very beginning of 2016, mission engineers have been modifying Cassini’s orbit around Saturn so as to position it for the final phase of the mission.
Scientists believe that the cloud is made of a compound of carbon and nitrogen known as dicyanoacetylene (C4N2), an ingredient in the chemical cocktail that colors the giant moon’s hazy, brownish-orange atmosphere.
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The series of dives will be performed before Cassini plunges to its death in September next year.
