According to Colwell

NASA has formally approved a two-year extension to Cassini’s mission at Saturn. While not a surprise (we’ve been planning the extended mission for nearly two years, and are a significant way through the process of the detailed observation plans for that time period), it is welcome news. The nominal mission ends June 30 of this year, four years after Cassini arrived at Saturn. The extended mission takes Cassini through Saturn’s equinox and nearly doubles the number of orbits or “revs” of Cassini around Saturn. Each rev brings close observing opportunities for Saturn’s atmosphere as well as its retinue of moons. Ring observations will be particularly hectic at the beginning of the extended mission (which hopefully will soon be known as the Equinox Mission), and then again around equinox as Cassini observes the thermal response of the rings as the Sun moves from the southern hemisphere to the northern hemisphere of Saturn. The equinox period is also when shadows cast by small vertical warps in the rings will be longest and easiest to observe, providing new measurements of the dynamics of the ring system.

Coming up: further discussions of what we can learn with an extension of the mission after the two-year Equinox Mission.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 10:14 pm and is filed under Astronomy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.