After traveling about 3.5 billion miles in nearly seven years, a little less than 13,000 pounds of complex technology from home is nearly finished with its original mission to explore Saturn and its moons
Named for Giovanni Domenico Cassini, the 17th-century astronomer who discovered four of Saturn's moon, the Cassini Mission to Saturn has provided new and fascinating information on the outer solar system since it arrived there in 2004. It was launched in 1997.
Cassini is a product of the "world's finest engineers" and is expected to function and provide data even after its primary mission ends at the end of summer, said Jonathan Lunine, a professor in the Lunar and Planetary Lab at the University of Arizona.
Lunine is an interdisciplinary scientist for the mission and has been involved in Cassini for 25 years, since the conceptual stages of the mission.
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Cassini is a project of NASA, the European Space Agency and 17 countries.
