Ferchi

STORY WRITTEN FOR & USED WITH PERMISSIONPosted: June 12, 2004Seven years after launch on a four-planet gravitational bank shot covering more than 2 billion miles, NASA's $3.3 billion nuclear-powered Cassini probe - the most sophisticated robotic spacecraft ever built - has finally reached the solar system's most spectacular target: The ringed planet Saturn. An artist's concept shows the Cassini space probe at Saturn. Credit: NASA/JPLKicking off a four-year orbital study of nature's own "lord of the rings," Cassini flew past the strange moon Phoebe June 11, passing within 1,285 miles of the tiny satellite. Seen as a mere speck of light from Earth and a blurry orb from the Voyager 2 probe in 1981, Phoebe was revealed as an irregular, heavily cratered world that defies easy explanation. The Phoebe flyby was a priceless opportunity to study what may be a captured chunk of debris left over from the birth of the solar system. But it was just the opening act in one of the most scientifically rich voyages of planetary exploration ever attempted. "It is really, truly the flagship mission of our time," said Carolyn Porco, chief of Cassini's imaging team and an authority on Saturn's rings. "We are exploring the richest planetary system available to us with this magnificent spacecraft, which is the most sophisticated suite of instrumentation ever taken into the outer solar system. So we are going to discover many things. "And on top of all of that, Saturn is the most alluring of all the planets, it's the icon among planets and that's where we're going. ... I think that people, from the email I'm getting from the public, are very jazzed about this mission. They do very much have the feeling that they are stowaways on this spacecraft."