Cassini: Bound for Saturn
In October, 1997, Cassini, one of the largest and most ungainly spacecraft to date, departed Cape Canaveral bound for Saturn and its moon, Titan. And by early August of 1998 it had traveled over 800 million miles toward its destination. If you haven't heard much about Cassini, a robotic probe, that's probably because NASA is aware that it does not fit its new leaner image.
Since the end of the Apollo program, Congress has been baying for NASA's budget on a plate. The agency has trimmed down, but it still remains an easy target. NASA's current administrator, Daniel Goldin, has drawn up a strategic plan full of talk of "streamlining" and "consolidation" to produce "faster, better, cheaper" planetary missions running commercially viable missions that cost no more than $183 million each. None of which describes Cassini.
Cassini's size and weight mean it will take seven years to get to Saturn, and the mission itself will take at least four years -- not really a fast turnaround in anyone's book. The costs run into billions rather than millions. Reason? Well, NASA is having a hard time explaining Cassini to Joe Sixpack. Its web site splutters something about the mission's providing "educational motivation for people of all ages."
All of which is a great shame, since the Cassini spacecraft is extremely important, more so for its passenger, the ESA's Huygens probe, which will be dropped off on Titan. The complex carbon molecules and methane gases on Titan's surface seem to provide much the same primordial ooze from which life first wriggled on Earth. On Titan, just as on Mars and other outposts, we study the origins of life as much to understand our own as in hope of finding signs of neighbors. — Chris Taylor
