Description: KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FLA. -- A seven-year journey to the ringed planet Saturn begins with the liftoff of a Titan IVB/Centaur carrying the Cassini orbiter and its attached Huygens probe. This spectacular streak shot was taken from Hangar AF on Cape Canaveral Air Station, with a solid rocket booster retrieval ship in the foreground. Launch occurred at 4:43 a.m. EDT, October 15, from Launch Complex 40 on Cape Canaveral Air Station. After a 2.2-billion mile journey that included two swingbys of Venus and one of Earth to gain additional velocity, the two-story tall spacecraft arrived at Saturn in July 2004. The orbiter was planned to circle the planet for four years, its complement of 12 scientific instruments gathering data about Saturn's atmosphere, rings and magnetosphere and conducting closeup observations of the Saturnian moons. The mission was extended several times and came to an end only in late 2017. Huygens, with a separate suite of six science instruments, separated from Cassini to fly on a ballistic trajectory toward Titan, the only celestial body besides Earth to have an atmosphere rich in nitrogen. Huygens provided the first direct sampling of Titan's atmospheric chemistry and the first detailed photographs of its surface. The Cassini mission was an international effort involving NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Italian Space Agency, Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI). The Jet Propulsion Laboratory managed the U.S. contribution to the mission for NASA's Office of Space Science. The major U.S. contractor was Lockheed Martin, which provided the launch vehicle and upper stage, spacecraft propulsion module and radioisotope thermoelectric generators that provided power for the spacecraft. The Titan IV/Centaur is a U.S. Air Force launch vehicle, and launch operations were managed by the 45th Space Wing.
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Credit: NASA/JPL/KSC
Image Number: PIA01050
Date: October 15, 1997
