The Cassini-Huygens probe has successfully entered orbit around Saturn after it’s four year journey to the planet, taking the first of what will undoubtedly be a great set of photos. Cassini was a Genoese astronomer who amongst many achievements, discovered four of Saturn’s moons in the late 17th century. Huygens, a Dutch astronomer, discovered the largest of Saturn’s moons, Titan, in 1655 becoming the first to discover a moon of the planet using one of his own lenses.
It’s fantastic that the probe has been placed so accurately, negotiating plenty of pitfalls to get into orbit. This kind of thing really does excite me. It’s now going to spend another four years in orbit around the planet, including many orbits of Titan where it’ll deposit the Huygens probe.
It may have cost NASA and the ESA several billion dollars to get it there, but it has to be worth it. The various websites have some wonderful background info including this enormously informative press pack which I read at lunchtime, some wonderful images (either press images, raw images or wallpaper images) and a nifty 3D model to spin.
The imagery is now coming out thick and fast with plenty of black and white photos of the rings from close up.
I guess I’m in a space mood at the moment. I’ve just started Bill Bryson’s new book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, which is enormously readable. He won the Aventis prize for science books a couple of weeks ago, and reading it now you can easily see why. I’ll say more about this book when I’ve finished it.
Then I went and finally watched Pitch Black last night which my brother’s been trying to persuade me to watch for absolutely ages. A good small(ish) thriller which you could nearly believe in. Very much in the Alien vein. The sequel is due soon, and one suspects that it’ll be somewhat brasher, and frankly I don’t really like Vin Diesel in anything he’s done.
But returning to Cassini for the moment, the one place where you really do get decent science coverage is the radio. Radio 4 does loads of science – I’ve just downloaded Test Tubes and Tantrums (well streamed and recorded). What a wonderfully exciting age the 17th century must have been. And sometime late on Sunday night on BBC1 there’s a Sky At Night on Saturn (which I’m pleased to note is viewable online, with a full archive).