yes, should be very good
http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/PR/20...R2004C05A.html
http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/~madler/cassini.jpg

let us hope everything does well

Got a problem with kilometers? :P That would still make an impression.
Have you ever read the book 2001? (Clarke wrote it while the film was in production, making changes along the way.) Anyway, the book had the Discovery going on to Saturn after Jupiter. I mention it here, because often, life ends up imitating art. I felt that the Galileo mission was like 2010 in a way (a spinning section of a spacecraft included!). Of course, it was a machine that did the adventure, but still, its almost like going on the ride. And now Cassini is about to take us on another space odessy! Wonder if it will snap some images of Iapetus? Of course, the BIG event is when the Huygens probes takes some snapshots of the smog moon Titan. Ooo, I can hardly wait to see what's there! Be prepared for anything!

__________________
I calculated the odds of this succeeding versus the odds I was doing something incredibly stupid...and I went ahead anyway. - Crow T. Robot

Godspeed, John Glenn. - Scott Carpenter

And these atomic bombs that science burst upon the world that night were strange even to the men that used them.
- H.G Wells, The World Set Free

To the conspiracy crowd, radiation is a big Boogey Man that inspires terror and death in all who encounter it. - JayUtah

Grand_Lunar:

There will be an Iapetus flyby earlier than first planned. When the Huygens entry was pushed back from November '04 to January '05, 2 additional early orbits with close Titan encounters were added. By chance the orbit on which the Huygens probe is released comes relatively close to Iapetus. Otherwise, the close flyby (1000-2000 km) of that satellite comes in September 2007.

Here are some links I posted in another thread.

Diagram of the early orbits
http://solarsystem.dlr.de/PG/cassini...ini_soi2tc.JPG

Geometry of the July 2 flyby of Titan
http://solarsystem.dlr.de/PG/cassini.../titan_t00.JPG

December 13 Titan encounter. I don’t know why but the Huygens entry site is shown at the right longitude (~160 E) but wrong latitude (18 N). It should be at 11 S., just below the dark patch (hydrocarbon lake ??)
http://solarsystem.dlr.de/PG/cassini.../titan_t0b.JPG

QuickTime animations of the entire orbit tour (255 MB! – about 40 minutes to download on DSL), all Iapetus views during the mission, and a detailed version of the Dec 31 –Jan 01 (UTC) flyby. This part of Iapetus was either not imaged or at only ~20-30 km/pixel by Voyager. The best Cassini images should be <400 m/pixel.
http://solarsystem.dlr.de/PG/cassini...on/orbit.shtml

Yaohua, you should try not to inline large images. Not everyone is coming here on DSL and it also stretches the layout of the page. Now I've to horizontal scoll to read the postings.

With my limited knowledge of Japanese, I find "Saturn" (5th and 6th character "Earth", "Star") in the headline and the last one is "Chart"
The second one may mean "west".

BTW, do you know that David Harland's great book on lunar exploration, "Exploring the Moon", was published in Chinese some time ago?
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/dave.harland/
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/dave.ha...tM-Chinese.jpg

Regards

Harald

__________________
"Flying in space is risky business, but just staying on this planet is risky business too." - John Young, astronaut

The image above is not very large in size. It's only 23.2 KB.

You were correct. The first 3 or 4 characters is "Cassini", 7th to 9th characters is "probe" or "spacecraft", 10th and 11th is "related to", 12th and 13th is "the Sun", 14th and 15th is "speed" or "velocity", the last 3 characters is "chart"

I'm afraid I've not heard of the book yet. ops:

Here are reviews of the english original:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1852330996
If you're interested, I can ask David for publisher details.

Harald

__________________
"Flying in space is risky business, but just staying on this planet is risky business too." - John Young, astronaut

Chinese studying space have started to grow, but still I feel more people believe in Astrology and Magic...like Americans who have faith in the face on Mars and the living Elvis on the moon!! . I've often wondered why some of the older people working in the US space program never get any rest, they have worked on the moon missions, the Viking and so on. So if the US is so keep on saving money why don't NASA send some of their cumbersome or costly projects to HongKong , Beijing and other places where they can do it for a cheap and fast and then have some extra money for their other explorations and keep their own jobs and space projects going, plus they can give some of their older staffs a good vacation.
I guess some NASA workers would rather get other projects going and this space-tourism moving before they can take a holiday?

Cassini hope it does great, wishing them luck!!

Too much politics involved, Unfortunatly.

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"We need to get back into that Saturn V world mentality."
Gene Cernan -- Commander Apollo 17

Am I the only one feeling the urge to convert this back into data and play the part after the middle of this year through an audio device and listen to what Cassini will "sound" like?

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GhiaPet Home Page

You mean like the data from Voyager and Galileo? Nope, your not the only one. I'd like to hear that too. It'd be wild to see (hear) if each planet had its own "voice". Guess in space we can hear you scream. Or in this case, "sing". 8)

__________________
I calculated the odds of this succeeding versus the odds I was doing something incredibly stupid...and I went ahead anyway. - Crow T. Robot

Godspeed, John Glenn. - Scott Carpenter

And these atomic bombs that science burst upon the world that night were strange even to the men that used them.
- H.G Wells, The World Set Free

To the conspiracy crowd, radiation is a big Boogey Man that inspires terror and death in all who encounter it. - JayUtah

No, it's actually different from what you're talking about. If you check the graph in the link, it's Cassini's orbital velocity (measured relative to the Sun). It isn't a planetary thing at all, nor a radio thing. Just a manmade orbital oscillation that hasn't even happened yet.

Added: Of course, yeah, I suppose it would help if the server with the linked image was up and available. :-?

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GhiaPet Home Page

Wonderful image

http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/200...aturn_comp.jpg

__________________
Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

And that's from 63 million miles away. 8)

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

the real picture of what's going on!

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/operation...sini_today.jpg

84 days to go

I wrote an asp.net page which displays the distance from Cassini-Huygens to Saturn in realtime. 8)