Probe Nears Saturn … Sort Of

Saturn and its rings are growing large in the view of the international Cassini spacecraft, which is nearing a rendezvous with the giant planet after years of travel across the solar system.

Cassini, carrying the European-built Huygens probe, was about 9.9 million miles from Saturn on Thursday, and officials said all was well with the $3 billion mission.

"The objective of the Cassini-Huygens (mission) is very simple: It's to allow us to rewrite the story of the lord of the rings," quipped Charles Elachi, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, at a news conference televised from the space agency's headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Recent images sent to Earth from Cassini show Saturn's subtly striped atmosphere and details of its rings.

Cassini, which was developed and assembled at the Pasadena, California-based lab, will fly by Saturn's outermost moon, Phoebe, next week and at the end of the month will fire its rocket in a maneuver to put it into orbit around the ringed planet for at least four years of observation.

Robert Mitchell, the lab's Cassini program manager, said the spacecraft had been put through a complete test of the orbital insertion procedure — without actually firing the rocket — "and the sequence clocked out just fine."

Jean-Pierre Lebreton, the project manager for the European Space Agency's Huygens project, said he was confidently looking forward to the probe's mission. Huygens will be released from Cassini in December to enter the atmosphere of the moon Titan in January.

Cassini was launched from Florida in 1997 on a 2.2 billion-mile journey to Saturn. The mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.

According to a NASA Web site, scientists are curious about Saturn's atmosphere and radioactive activity, as well as how it formed. While three previous probes have passed by Saturn — Pioneer 11, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 — none have visited since 1981.