Just before midnight on Dec. 31, 2003, I treated my daughter's New Year's Eve Party to a spectacular site. Directly overhead we saw a brilliant yellow planet outshining the stars around it. Saturn was having its closest encounter with Earth for the next 29 years -- 1.2 billion kilometers away. Furthermore, its rings are now tipped toward us. Sunlight reflected from Saturn's rings make the planet extra bright this year.
2004 is going to be an exciting year for Saturn fans. The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, which began its 7 year voyage from earth in 1997, will arrive there in June. Although other spacecraft have visited Saturn ( Pioneer 11 and the Voyagers), they flew past with brief explorations limited to a few days. When Cassini reaches Saturn it will orbit and study the planet for at least four years! You can read more about the mission at NASA's CASSINI MISSION HOMEPAGE.
The origin of the great rings of Saturn remain one of the great mysteries of Astronomy.. Some evidence suggests that the rings are only a few hundred million years old, much younger than the several billions of years that our solar system has existed.
This photo was taken with a Celestron 8" telescope, a 4x Powermate amplifier, and an ST10XME camera. A total of 15 images were selected from over 100 exposures for combination into the image above.
The last of the big-budget, big-mission planetary probes, Cassini stands over two stories tall and weighs more than six tons. At $3.4 billion, its budget dwarfs the recent Mars Pathfinder and Mars Global Surveyor missions!"