What We Take for Granted

You have grown up with the internet, making this discussion of the night sky over Bend, your hometown possible from three hours drive away. And you are growing up in a time when what should seem fantastic, just because it was just a few short years ago for people like your Dad and even more so for me, seems almost ordinary.

Today, because I know your night sky will have one too many clouds in it, we will talk about a special space craft visiting place I know I'll never visit - but you might someday! Cassini spacecraft entered orbit around Saturn to begin the first in-depth, up-close study of the ringed planet and its domain (moons and rings and such). It has been in this orbit for over four years and now is doing some additional sightseeing.

This part of the extended mission called the Cassini Equinox Mission.

"We're looking at a string of remarkable discoveries -- about Saturn's magnificent rings, its amazing moons, its dynamic magnetosphere (how it acts like a giant magnet holding the rings and the moons where they are) and about Titan's surface and atmosphere," says Dr. Linda Spilker, deputy project scientist. Can you imagine a job where you get to do this everyday?

Dr Spilker went on to say, "Some of the mission highlights so far include discovering that Titan has Earth-like processes and that the small moon Enceladus (which Cassini flew past at only thirty miles from the surface)has a hot-spot at its southern pole, jets on the surface that spew out ice crystals and evidence of liquid water beneath its surface."

Cassini's observations of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, have given scientists a glimpse of what Earth might have been like before life evolved. They now believe Titan possesses many parallels to Earth, including lakes, rivers, channels, dunes, rain, snow, clouds, mountains and possibly volcanoes.

The spray of icy particles from the surface jets collectively forms a towering plume three times taller than the width of Enceladus. It is now thought that the plume feeds particles into Saturn's most expansive ring, the E ring. Already in the extended mission, the spacecraft has come as close as 25 kilometers (15 miles) from the moon's surface.

The extraordinary results from the Cassini spacecraft and the European Space Agency's Huygens probe, which plunged through Titan's dense, smoggy atmosphere to its surface, have generated hundreds of scientific articles and been the subject of special issues of the world’s most important scientific journals.

This picture of Saturn was taken on April 27, 2009 and received on Earth April 28th, 2009. The camera was pointing toward SATURN at approximately 987,316 kilometers away.

The first four years of the Cassini-Huygens saga brought a new dimension of understanding of the complex and diverse Saturn system. The two year Cassini Equinox Mission is expected to be just as exciting. During the extended mission the spacecraft will make 60 additional orbits of Saturn, including 26 flybys of Titan, seven of Enceladus, and one each of Dione, Rhea and Helene. Investigations of Saturn's rings, the planet itself and new places within Saturn's magnetosphere await.

Why is it called Cassini?

It could have been a star!

Few of us think of a planets as much more than rocks n space, round, with orbits around a sun. Jupiter, our largest planet needed just a little more mass to be a star. But what is mass?

Mass on earth is easy to figure out. Simply weigh it. Because gravity is even, when one thing weighs more, it has more mass. Size has nothing to do with it. If you blow up a balloon to be larger than your brother's head, Martin's head will still weigh more. So when we talk about Jupiter needing a little more mass, if it was eighty times more dense, it would have had enough of the stuff to make it a solar system.

At last count, Jupiter has 49 moons. Galileo, who discovered it using a primitive telescope thought the moons he saw were stars. (Here is a list of the names of Jupiter's moons) As cool as it looks, it would not be a very nice place to visit. The gravity would squash you. It is 20,000 times that of earth!

Made up of ammonia gas and beneath that hydrogen that, because of that gravity, has turned to liquid. And deep inside Jupiter, at the very center is a solid core. In fact, the core of Jupiter is one big, earth sized magnet.

One of its moons, Io, is the most volcanically active objects in our solar system. Ganymede is also the largest moon in our solar system.

I hope you get to see it.

Here are some other things you should be looking for on a clear night during the month of May.