Nasa extends Saturn probe mission - BBC News

The United States space federal agency (Nasa) have extended the international Cassini-Huygens missionary post by two years.

The remote-controlled Cassini-Huygens ballistic capsule entered celestial orbit around Saturn in 2004 on a missionary post that was supposed to come up to an end in July this year.

The two-year mission extension will embrace some 60 other celestial orbits of Saturn and more than flybys of its moons.

These volition include 26 flybys of Colossus - its greatest moon - seven of Enceladus, and one each of Dione, Rhea and Helene.

Bob Mitchell, programme director for Cassini-Huygens astatine Nasa's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), in California, commented: "The ballistic capsule is performing exceptionally well and the squad is highly motivated, so we're excited at the prospect of another two years."

Dr Rosaly Lopes, also from JPL, told BBC News: "We're very pleased. We were expecting National Aeronautics And Space Administration to widen Cassini for another two years, we had been told to program for it, so we had already done a batch of the planning and decided what the circuit was going to look like.

"But it's nice to actually have got the news out, because you never cognize up until the point when they subscribe on the dotted line."

'Earth-like' world

The missionary post have made arresting finds about the Saturn system since it arrived at the ringed planet four old age ago.

Its surveys of the biggest moon, Titan, have got got provided a glance of what World might have been like before life evolved. Conditions on the moon are believed to resemble those on our ain planet 4.6 billion old age ago.

The European Christiaan Huygens investigation was built to research Titan's atmosphere, weather condition and its surface. Christiaan Huygens piggybacked on Cassini, separating from the artificial satellite in December 2004 to get its journeying to the orange-tinged satellite.

In January 2005, Christiaan Huygens parachuted through Titan's thick haze and touched down on the surface, and returned information for respective hours before succumbing to the cold.

The missionary post have revealed new marks for future exploration

Cassini's observations of the moon from space have got revealed Earth-like features such as as lakes, rivers, channels, dunes, rain, snow, clouds, mounts and possibly volcanoes.

Unlike Earth, Titan's lakes, rivers and rainfall are composed of methane and ethane, and temperatures attain a scarey -180C (-290F).

Although Titan's heavy ambiance bounds viewing the surface, Cassini's high-resolution microwave radar insurance and imagination by the infrared mass spectrometer have got given men of science a better look.

"We're going to have got a batch more Colossus flybys," Dr Lopes said of the drawn-out mission.

"These flybys are highly contested because everyone desires to look at Colossus with the different instruments, and so the more than flybys the better. With radar, it's going to let us to map much more than of the surface."

New tricks

The Enceladus moon, regarded as "just another ball of ice" until Cassini arrived, have now go a high precedence for additional exploration.

The ballistic capsule establish grounds for geysers of water-ice jetting from the surface.

These geysers, which hit out at a distance three modern times the diameter of the moon itself, provender atoms into Saturn's outermost ring.

Christiaan Huygens is shown on Titan's surface in this artist's impression

In the drawn-out mission, Cassini could come up as stopping point as 24km (15 miles) from the moon's surface.

Other activities for Cassini men of science during the drawn-out missionary post will include monitoring seasons on Colossus and Saturn, observing alone ring events - such as as the 2009 equinox when the Sun will be in the airplane of the rings - and exploring new topographic points within Saturn's magnetic "envelope" - or magnetosphere.

Jim Green, manager of Nasa's planetary scientific discipline division in American Capital DC, said the drawn-out missionary post would let the scientific discipline community and the public to go on to share in "unlocking Saturn's secrets".

Nasa said three of the scientific discipline instruments on Cassini were suffering from minor ailments, but the impact on information assemblage was minimal.

The ballistic capsule will have got adequate propellent left after the drawn-out missionary post to potentially let a 3rd form of operations.

Science from the drawn-out missionary post could put the basis for possible new robotic missionary posts to Colossus or Enceladus, which are under survey by National Aeronautics And Space Administration and the European Space Agency (Esa).

Cassini-Huygens was launched on 15 October 1997, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, taking seven old age to do the 3.5 billion kilometer (2.2 billion miles) journeying to Saturn.

The Cassini-Huygens missionary post is a combined undertaking between Nasa, Esa and the Italian Space Agency (Asi).