SUMMARY:Some 800 million miles away, NASA's Cassini spacecraft has orbited Saturn and captured images of its rings and icy moons. After nearly 5 billion miles traveled and 20 years of sending revealing data from the gas giant, Cassini is winding down its way toward a suicide plunge into the planet. Science correspondent Miles O'Brien reports on how NASA is choreographing the spacecraft's final dive.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour): Some of the numbers involved in the Cassini mission are truly mind-blowing.
More than 290 orbits of Saturn, nearly five billion miles traveled, 450,000-plus images taken. There have been nearly 4,000 papers published about the work. And it included the participation of 27 nations.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): A report published this week in Science magazine offered new remarkable details about the presence of water on one of Saturn’s moons. It once again stirred talk about the possibility of life elsewhere in our solar system. For more, we are joined from Los Angeles by David Stevenson of the California Institute of Technology. He co-authored the article.
So tell us about this moon, Enceladus. You knew about it, quite a bit about it before. Tell us what you found and how did you find it?
DAVID STEVENSON, California Institute of Technology: So we knew already that Enceladus has geysers. Water coming out of cracks near the south pole. But we didn’t know what was beneath the surface. What we’ve now done by tracking the Cassini spacecraft, which is in orbit around Saturn, is figure out that there must be excess mass underneath the ice at the south pole. And water will do that because water is more dense than ice. This is an ocean that is about the size of Lake Superior, perhaps even larger and it is about 10 kilometers thick. So it’s a lot of water.
SUMMARY: The Cassini spacecraft has been capturing snapshots from Saturn for the past 10 years. Carolyn Porco of the Space Science Institute talks to Judy Woodruff about capturing and sharing images of the "jewel of the solar system" and discoveries made about the planet's meteorology and moons.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
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