U.S.-European spacecraft flying by Venus on the way to Saturn

U.S.-European spacecraft flying by Venus on the way to Saturn

WASHINGTON (June 25, 1999 9:20 p.m. EDT http://www.nandotimes.com) - The U.S. spacecraft Cassini and the European probe Huygens circled around Venus Friday to get a boost in speed for their voyage to Saturn, the U.S. space agency NASA said.

The pair flew by the planet at an altitude of 370 miles before resuming their planned seven-year journey.

The two linked spacecraft were launched in October 1997 and are to reach Saturn by 2004 after a journey of 2.2 billion miles.

Cassini will fly over Saturn while Huygens lands on its moon, Titan, in a mission scientists hope will shed light on planet formation and the beginning of life on Earth.

The pair are to use the gravitational pull of several other planets along the way to increase speed.

They circled Venus for the second time Friday after an earlier flyby in 1998 and are to fly by the Earth this summer, followed by Jupiter in 2000.

And on July 1, 2004, Cassini-Huygens will go into orbit around Saturn, the solar system's second largest planet with a diameter of 74,732 miles.

Saturn's diameter is 9.4 times larger than the Earth's, but smaller than Jupiter's.

During the mission, Cassini -- a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) spacecraft -- will orbit around Saturn some 70 times to study the planet's landscape and atmosphere for four years.

Huygens, which was built by the European Space Agency, is scheduled to land on the Saturn moon Titan in December 2004 to gather data on its surface and transmit them to Cassini.

Titan's thick atmosphere had prevented previous missions from gathering imagery. The moon is of special interest to scientists because of its Earth-like characteristics.

With an atmosphere composed of nitrogen and organic molecules and a surface that may carry ethane and methane, Titan could be very much be like the Earth in its early stages, but frozen.