Cassini's scientific harvest

The US space agency NASA is admired for its ambitious deep space projects, but British scientists and hardware designers are also involved, even in the most spectacular missions, such as the Cassini probe to Saturn.

Cassini is one of the most sophisticated spacecraft ever built, with thirty separate experiments to measure and probe every aspect of Saturn and its family of moons. The craft was launched in 1997 and took seven years to reach its target. Within the first six months of arrival, it released a separate vehicle, the European Space Agency's Huygens probe, bound for the surface of Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Huygens was a brilliant success, and Cassini continues to orbit Saturn.

The UK Solar-Planetary Physics community is analyzing a constant stream of data from Cassini. Saturn has a magnetic field, similar to Earth’s, which forms a similar magnetic cavity or ‘magnetosphere’ around the planet. Saturn is also swept by the same solar wind that sweeps the Earth—but Saturn is ten times farther away from the Sun, and its magnetosphere is dramatically different from ours. The interactions are also affected by the large number of moons and the dusty rings.