A rchive Date
[ 05-06-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ NASA ]
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[Cassini spacecraft survives trip through asteroid belt
By MATTHEW FORDAHL -- The Associated Press
Saturday, April 15, 2000PASADENA, Calif. (AP) - NASA's Cassini spacecraft has flown through an asteroid belt without any problems and is on track for its 2004 encounter with Saturn.
The region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter has lots of rocky debris, but no one expected any trouble for the $3.3 billion mission, said Bob Mitchell, Cassini's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
| This is a computer-rendered image of Cassini during the Saturn Orbit Insertion (SOI) maneuver, just after the main engine has begun firing. Image courtesy of the Cassini home page |
"I'm glad we passed through it, but it's pretty routine," he said Friday. "There's a lot of material in the belt, but there's also an awful lot of space out there."
Only seven spacecraft have flown through the asteroid belt since NASA's Pioneer 10 made the first flight in 1972. Before then, scientists were unsure whether anything could survive the debris, which is believed to be left over from a planetary collision long ago.
Cassini, which was launched in 1997, entered the field in mid-December and cleared the field on Wednesday.
During its asteroid belt flight, the probe's camera imaged the asteroid 2685 Masursky, and preliminary evidence suggests that it may have a different composition than previously thought, scientists said.
Cassini will fly by Jupiter on Dec. 30 and arrive for its primary mission around Saturn on July 1, 2004. A few months later, it will release the European Space Agency's Huygens probe, which will land on Saturn's moon Titan.
Cassini is now about 391 million miles from Earth and has traveled 1.36 billion miles since launch. Its trajectory has used the gravity of Venus and Earth to propel it toward Jupiter and Saturn. ]
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