A spacecraft that was built in part at the University of Iowa is maneuvering to make the first of its final orbits around Saturn this week. U-I research scientist Bill Kurth says Cassini is now positioned to zoom very close to the ringed planet’s atmosphere, skimming the cloudtops of an unexplored region which should produce a wealth of new data.
The robotic spacecraft was launched in 1997 and was originally designed to spend four years orbiting Saturn. It’s now approaching 14 years in orbit. Kurth says they’ve angled the craft to scoot between Saturn’s rings and the atmosphere for a total of 22 orbits.
Kurth says. It’s a bittersweet finish for the one-point-four-billion-dollar spacecraft, he says, as the repeatedly-extended experiment is — at last — reaching its conclusion with this new trajectory.
The Iowa-built instrument onboard Cassini studies radioactive emissions and waves in the ionized gas that surrounds the planet, called plasma. Kurth helped build the instrument by hand in Iowa City. The final orbits will bring the spacecraft into position to analyze the lightning in Saturn’s thunderstorms which can sometimes last up to nine months. It will also be able to study the planet’s magnetic field, the composition of the rings, and Saturn’s northern and southern “lights” or auroras, which are similar to those above Earth. Kurth is also one of the lead researchers for Juno, the NASA spacecraft now orbiting Jupiter, which still has many years left in its mission.
