MOSIR Project

Cassini at Saturn; Moons, Rings and Dust

Speaker	Ralf Srama (Max-Planck-Institut)
Date	2010/03/12 - 2010/03/12
Seminar	CPS Seminar

Place	Kobe Univ.
Documents	Presentation (40.11MB)

Abstract	Cassini Huygens is the biggest NASA interplanetary mission every flown. Cassini launched in 1997 and reached Saturn in 2004. Since then the probe successfully explores Saturn's environment and it made many discoveries. This talk introduces the Cassini mission and summarizes some major discoveries. It also introduces the Cosmic Dust Analyser onboard Cassini and major achievements are presented and discussed. Saturn's outer dusty E ring is composed out of micron sized dust grains distributed widely in the entire system. This E ring is replenished by the active ice geysers on the surface of Enceladus. Some tiny dust grains even escape from Saturn's magnetospere. Another important aspect is the instrument operations which will be described in order to give insight into the most exciting interplanetary spacecraft ever flown. Excellent science is not coming for free - engineers worldwide prepare the observation scenarios with outstanding success.
Keywords	Cassini, Saturn, Moons, Ring