NASA’s Cassini spacecraft marked 15 years in space Monday (Oct. 15), and the well-traveled probe won’t stop studying Saturn and its many moons anytime soon.
Cassini has logged more than 3.8 billion miles (6.1 billion kilometers) since its launch on Oct. 15, 1997, researchers said. The spacecraft has made many contributions since arriving at Saturn in July 2004, including discovering water-ice geysers on the moon Encelaudus and snapping the first views of the hydrocarbon lakes on Saturn’s largest moon Titan.
During its time in space, the Cassini probe has sent home about 444 gigabytes of scientific data, including more than 300,000 images. Researchers have published more than 2,500 papers based on Cassini data so far, NASA officials said.
"As Cassini conducts the most in-depth survey of a giant planet to date, the spacecraft has been flying the most complex gravity-assisted trajectory ever attempted," Robert Mitchell, Cassini program manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement false-color image of Saturn, a composite of many images taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, was taken on Nov. 1, 2008.
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