Mission Details

DID YOU KNOW THAT:

Cassini is the largest interplanetary spacecraft ever built.
Cassini is two stories tall and thirteen feet wide. It would take about seven people, with arms outstretched, to encircle Cassini.
It requires the same amount of power to operate a light bulb in your refrigerator as it does to send a radio signal from Saturn to Earth. (20w).
The 20 watt spacecraft transmitters produce a received power of about 0.0000000000000001 watts at the Deep Space Network antennas on earth. The signal typically takes at least an hour to reach the Earth from Saturn.
Cassini is designed to withstand the heat of 2.7 Suns.
Including the industrial teams and the scientists at universities and research institutions, there are 4,300 people currently involved in designing the Cassini mission.
The Cassini spacecraft is about the size and weight of an empty 30 passenger school bus.
On a busy day at Saturn the spacecraft could transmit up to 4 gigabits (4,000000000 bits, or about a CD-ROM worth) of information to Earth.
It will take a Titan IV launch vehicle with two solid rocket motor strap-ons, a centaur upper stage, and about 3,000 kilograms (6,600 pounds) of propellant to complete Cassini's mission to Saturn. Well over 99 percent of Cassini's trip, however, will be an unpowered coast through space!
Cassini will travel 3.2 billion kilometres (2 billion miles) to reach Saturn. This is equivalent to a fly travelling from London to Hawaii.
The spacecraft will reach relative speeds of 5.2 kilometres per second (18,720 mph) approaching Saturn, 19.1 kilometres per second (45,040 mph) flying by Earth and 13.0 kilometres per second (30,660 mph) flying by Venus - equivalent to flying from Los Angeles to Boston in under 5 minutes.
Over 300,000 colour images of Saturn, the rings, Titan and the other moons will be returned including 1,100 pictures of Titan taken by the Huygens Probe.
The Earth fly by in August 1999 will reduce the speed of the Earth in its orbit and delay the start of the millennium by about one hundred million millionth of a second.

Prof. Manuel Grande
Last updated: 1 July 2004