Cassini-Huygens Reaches Phoebe

Anonymous Explorer writes "The Cassini-Huygens probe is set to fly by the largest outer Saturn moon of Phoebe today. Cassini will be roughly 2000 km from the surface of Phoebe at 1:56 Pacific time Friday, June 11. Thats pretty darn close. The newest images of Phoebe are already thousands of times better than the previous ones taken by the Voyager 2 mission in 1981. Phoebe is interesting in that it maintains a retrograde orbit around Saturn. This has lead to the hypothesis that it is an ancient asteroid that has been captured by the gravitational pull from Saturn. Phoebe may provide some important insights into the composition of early building blocks of our planets. Phoebe was discovered in 1898 by American astronomer William Pickering. As always, discussion about this mission can be found at #cassini on irc.freenode.net."

Comments

Wow

[Mick Ohrberg]

This is just amazing. We're really reaching further and further out in the solar system. And not just by blindly sending probes out there, but by consciously seeking to get close to other bodies in the solar system, and really finding out. I really hope I get to see the Europa landings in my lifetime.

Re:No Different

[monkeySauce]

How can you possibly determine what is or isn't valuable information before it's even discovered??

Granted there are never any guarantees, but the Cassini probe is going to be over 1000 times closer than previous probes. You never know what it might discover.

Re:When it's actually arriving (indeed)

[Billy the Mountain]

the probe is doing the close flyby at 2056 UTC (i.e. about two and a half hours from now

Sorry to confuse the issue even more, but since the probe is 80 light minutes from the earth, does that mean that 2056 UTC is when it's actually happening, or is that when we finally find out that it happened 80 minutes in the past?

BTM