Cassini Garners Top Honor From Air and Space Museum

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109 PHONE 818-354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

Jia-Rui Cook 818-354-0850
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
jccook@jpl.nasa.gov

News release: 2012-071 March 14, 2012

Cassini Garners Top Honor From Air and Space Museum

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-071&cid=release_2012-071

PASADENA, Calif. – NASA's Cassini mission to Saturn, managed by the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., has received the top group honor from the Smithsonian's
National Air and Space Museum – the Trophy for Current Achievement. Representatives
for Cassini will receive the trophy on March 21 at a black-tie dinner in Washington, D.C.

"Here we are some 15 years since Cassini launched and it's amazing how well the
spacecraft has operated," said Charles Elachi, director of JPL. "Thanks to the superb
work of both the development team and the operations team, Cassini has been able to
show us the beauty and diversity of the Saturn system and, beyond that, to study what is
really a miniature solar system in its own right."

The trophies for current and lifetime achievement are the National Air and Space
Museum's most prestigious awards. They recognize outstanding achievements in the
fields of aerospace science, technology and their history.

"The National Air and Space Museum Trophy is among the most prestigious awards
given by the Smithsonian, it recognizes significant aerospace accomplishments," said
National Air and Space Museum Director Jack Dailey. "We are pleased to present it to
the Cassini-Huygens Flight Team in the Current Achievement category."

The Cassini-Huygens mission, a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space
Agency and the Italian Space Agency, launched in 1997. It performed a dramatic burn in
June 2004 to slide into orbit around Saturn and, in December of that year, the spacecraft
successfully released ESA's Huygens probe to pass down through the atmosphere of
Saturn's largest moon Titan.

Mission highlights include discovering a plume of water ice and organic particles
spraying from the icy moon Enceladus and watching signs of seasonal change from
northern winter into northern spring, such as the evolution of a monster storm in Saturn's
northern hemisphere. Cassini and Huygens have also revealed just how Earth-like Titan
is, as the only body in the solar system other than Earth that has stable liquid on the
surface. The mission has discovered two new rings around Saturn and four new moons.

The Cassini spacecraft has also been navigating the Saturn system for nearly eight years
with accuracies often better than half a mile (kilometer) while 700 to 800 million miles
(1.2 to 1.3 billion kilometers) away from Earth. Cassini has also flown within 16 miles
(25 kilometers) of the surface of Enceladus and many times through the upper
atmosphere of Titan

The project completed its original prime mission in 2008 and has been extended twice. It
is now in its solstice mission, which will enable scientists to observe seasonal change in
the Saturn system through the northern summer solstice.

"We are very proud of what Cassini has accomplished," said Robert Mitchell, Cassini
program manager based at JPL. "But our workhorse spacecraft still has much work left to
do. We can't wait to see what Saturn, its rings and photogenic moons will reveal to us
next."

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space
Agency and the Italian Space Agency. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of
the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's
Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard
cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/ .

-end-

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