Overview
- Covers the Cassini-Huygens mission to date in unmatched depth and completeness
- Highlights an important discovery in the search for life, the revelation by Cassini that Saturn's moon Enceladus has the environment to conceivably harbor life
- Relies on over 50 interviews conducted with NASA and ESA mission staff for a behind-the-scenes look at how the mission was conducted
Part of the book series: Springer Praxis Books (PRAXIS)
Part of the book sub series: Space Exploration (SPACEE)
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Table of contents (15 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Creating a new expedition to Saturn
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Front Matter
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Designing, fabricating, and integrating the Cassini-Huygens space vessel
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Front Matter
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A great natural laboratory
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Front Matter
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Keywords
About this book
Cassini-Huygens was the most ambitious and successful space journey ever launched to the outer Solar System. This book examines all aspects of the journey: its conception and planning; the lengthy political processes needed to make it a reality; the engineering and development required to build the spacecraft; its 2.2-billion mile journey from Earth to the Ringed Planet and the amazing discoveries from the mission. The author traces how the visions of a few brilliant scientists matured, gained popularity and eventually became a reality.
Innovative technical leaps were necessary to assemble such a multifaceted spacecraft and reliably operate it while it orbited a planet so far from our own. The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft design evolved from other deep space efforts, most notably the Galileo mission to Jupiter, enabling the voluminous, paradigm-shifting scientific data collected by the spacecraft. Some of these discoveries are absolute gems. A small satellite that scientists once thought of as a dead piece of rock turned out to contain a warm underground sea that could conceivably harbor life. And we now know that hiding under the mist of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is a world with lakes, fluvial channels, and dunes hauntingly reminiscent of those on our own planet, except that on Titan, it’s not water that fills those lakes but hydrocarbons. These and other breakthroughs illustrate why the Cassini-Huygens mission will be remembered as one of greatest voyages of
discovery ever made.Reviews
“In this four-part work, Meltzer … addresses the development of the concept and the politics associated with its development, the design of the spacecraft and its mission, the mission itself, and the results of the mission. … This is a testament to both the spacecraft designers and the ingenuity of the operations team. A well-written, thoroughly researched book with appropriate photographs and drawings. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All space technology and history collections.” (A. M. Strauss, Choice, Vol. 52 (12), August, 2015)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Michael Meltzer is a full-time writer of space exploration books and an environmental scientist and engineer. Meltzer worked as an environmental engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from 1990 to 2006. Before that, he was a senior environmental scientist at Jacobs Engineering Group. He holds a doctorate in Environmental Science and Engineering from UCLA and a masters degree in Geophysics and a bachelors degree in Physics from University of California at Berkeley. Meltzer has designed the curricula for two college-level classes.
His previous books include When Biospheres Collide (NASA, 2011) and Mission to Jupiter (NASA, 2009) and a textbook entitled Passive & Active Solar Heating Technology (Prentice-Hall, 1985).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Cassini-Huygens Visit to Saturn
Book Subtitle: An Historic Mission to the Ringed Planet
Authors: Michael Meltzer
Series Title: Springer Praxis Books
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07608-9
Publisher: Springer Cham
eBook Packages: Physics and Astronomy, Physics and Astronomy (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-07607-2Published: 20 January 2015
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-07608-9Published: 02 January 2015
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXII, 409
Number of Illustrations: 44 b/w illustrations, 40 illustrations in colour
Topics: Aerospace Technology and Astronautics, Popular Science in Astronomy, Planetology, Astronomy, Observations and Techniques