March Public Lecture – “Visiting the Lord of the Rings”

On Wednesday 21st March, we welcome guest speaker Jerry Stone FBIS FRAS who will be talking about Cassini-Huygens mission to the great planet Saturn – the titular “Lord of the Rings”.

Cassini at Saturn (Image: NASA/JPL and Paul Kemp/Terry Regan)

The Cassini spacecraft is currently orbiting the planet Saturn after a journey of more than 7 years. It carried the Huygens probe which separated from Cassini in December 2004 and descended to the surface of Titan (Saturn’s largest moon) in January 2005. In this talk, you’ll hear about the exploration of Saturn -  from before we knew it had rings, up to the latest results.

Jerry Stone is a freelance presenter on astronomy and space exploration, has given talks on space for over 40 years and is the author of “One Small Step”. He runs Spaceflight UK and presents space workshops for schools all over the UK.

The lecture is open to everyone, all are welcome. It takes place at the Henry Dixon Hall, Rivenhall End on Wednesday 21st March at 7:30pm. Entry is £4 for non-members. For further information on how to get there, see the Events page.

Spacecraft Modelmaking: Cassini-Huygens

The spacecraft:
Cassini-Huygens was a joint mission by NASA, ESA and ASI to study Saturn, its rings and moons. It was launched on 15th October 1997 onboard a Titan 1VB Centaur Rocket and, after a journey of 6 years and 9 months, it entered into orbit around Saturn on July 1st 2004. The attached Huygens probe was released from Cassini on Christmas Day 2004 and landed on Titan two weeks later.

The mission has had two extensions since then, in 2008 and 2010, meaning the spacecraft will stay in service around Saturn until 2017.

At 22 feet high and 13 feet wide, the spacecraft is the largest and the most complex built to date, featuring over 1,630 interconnected  electronic components, 22,000 wire connections and over 8 miles of cablings – at launch it weighed in at 5,600 kilograms (12,000lbs).

In June 1999, Cassini’s velocity was recorded at 44.0 kilometres per second (98,346 mph). Radio signals to Cassini take anywhere between 68 to 84 minutes to travel from the Earth.

The model has been composited here by Paul Kemp, with a NASA/JPL Cassini image of Saturn.

The Model:
This is the second spacecraft model built by NEAS member Terry Regan. Again, it has been scratch built from plastic card, rods and struts – materials that model railway modellers use.

The plans were, like Galileo, taken from those designed for paper models, meaning features like fuel cells would be two round discs slotted together at 90 degrees. The antenna dish was formed from thick plastic card, softened by a heat gun and pulled down over a bottom of a truck oil filter to give the correct dish shape, then trimmed up and detailed.

To make the main body of the space craft plastic card was rolled up, and ribs were added using small strips cut and shaped to fit the body. Various pieces went into making the cameras, gyros and rocket engines. The magnetometer boom was made from 0.6 mm plastic rod and over 700 pieces went into this section alone. The model was then painted and a base was made to display the  model. In total, it took about 9 months to build.

In comparison to the actual spacecraft, this model is 170mm long, 90mm wide, with the magnetometer boom 300mm long and the dish 120mm in diameter.

Raw Images from Today’s Cassini’s Close Flyby of Dione

Just in … crisp, detailed raw images from Cassini’s close flyby of  Dione earlier today, including views of its north polar region at a
never-before-seen resolution.

Notice especially the long, bright ice cliffs crossing a region of the moon that, during the Voyager mission, became known as the `wispy terrain’.   Voyager couldn’t resolve what Cassini has since seen in great detail:  That this terrain is not crossed by wispy-looking bands  of hummocky bright ice, as was previously thought, but instead is laced  with organized sets of fractures that reveal bright, clean, sub-surface ice.

Go to … http://www.ciclops.org/view_event/141/Dione_Rev_137_Raw_Preview?js=1

… and check it all out for yourself.

Enjoy!

Carolyn Porco
Cassini Imaging Team Leader
Director, CICLOPS
Space Science Institute

[via CICLOPS]

Sounds from Space

Don Gurnett is a scientist from the University of Iowa whose research includes recording and analyzing sound waves from space.

Here is a link to Gurnett’s Space Audio website.

You can listen online to some of these sounds (from all over the Solar System), which have been recorded by a variety of spacecraft over the past 40 years (including Voyager and Cassini). You can also watch animations of the sound with the specrogram of the wave.

Cassini to image Enceladus

On Monday, the Cassini spacecraft will fly very close to the south pole of Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus, and will return the best images so far of that region.

Cassini discovered that Enceladus has plumes of water spurting up from deep inside the moon, indicating the presence of liquid water. This obviously makes Enceladus a very juicy target for Cassini, and the images should be spectacular.

Stay tuned to sites like the Cassini CICLOPS page, which will have the latest images in all their high-res glory.