NASA space probe Cassini-Huygens is less than half an hour away from a reverse firing to plunk itself into Saturnine orbit:
During its orbit entry, the probe will fly closer to Saturn than it will at any other moment of its four-year mission to come, giving it the chance to study the planet from about 20,000km away."In a sense, Cassini and the Huygens probe are like time machines that will take us back to examine a world we've never seen before, a world that may resemble what our own world was like 4.5 billion years ago," said Jean-Pierre Lebreton, the European Space Agency mission manager and project scientist for the Huygens probe.
By comparison, our own moon is 384,000 kilometers away and quite a bit smaller than the second-largest planet in the solar system. Cassini will be up close — very close. Let's hope he remembers to pull out the camera. (Streaming webcasts are here.)
FROM JPL MISSION CONTROL: "Godspeed Cassini-Huygens, and may we see you in orbit."