* Ion and Neutral Camera ( INCA ), an instrument aboard the Cassini – Huygens spacecraft

* 1714 – César-François Cassini de Thury, French astronomer ( d. 1784 )

* 1625 – Giovanni Domenico Cassini, Italian scientist and astronomer ( d. 1712 )

Among the Laboratory's current major active projects are the Mars Science Laboratory mission ( which includes the Curiosity rover ), the Cassini – Huygens mission orbiting Saturn, the Mars Exploration Rovers ( Spirit and Opportunity ), the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Dawn mission to the dwarf planet Ceres and asteroid Vesta, the Juno spacecraft en route to Jupiter, the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory ( GRAIL ) mission to the Moon, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array ( NuSTAR ) X-ray telescope, and the Spitzer Space Telescope.

* Cassini – Huygens

A second-generation Mariner spacecraft, called the Mariner Mark II series, eventually evolved into the Cassini – Huygens probe, now in orbit around Saturn.

* 1997 – The Cassini probe launches from Cape Canaveral on its way to Saturn.

The Cassini – Huygens mission to Titan discovered clouds formed from methane or ethane which deposit rain composed of liquid methane and other organic compounds.

* April 18 – Jacques Cassini, French astronomer ( b. 1677 )

** NASA launches the Cassini – Huygens probe to Saturn.

* April 11 – Oleg Cassini, American fashion designer ( d. 2006 )

* December 6 – Taiping Rebellion: French minister de Bourboulon arrives at the Heavenly Capital aboard the Cassini.

* February 8 – Jacques Cassini, French astronomer ( d. 1756 )

* June 8 – Giovanni Domenico Cassini, Italian astronomer and engineer ( d. 1712 )

* September 4 – César-François Cassini de Thury, French astronomer ( b. 1714 )

* June 30 – Jacques Dominique, comte de Cassini, French astronomer ( d. 1845 )

Artist's conception of Cassini – Huygens as it enters Saturn's orbit

* Cassini – Huygens – first Saturn orbiter + Titan lander

* September 14 – Giovanni Domenico Cassini, Italian-French astronomer and engineer ( b. 1625 )

Saturn eclipses the Sun, as seen from the Cassini – Huygens space probe.

** Cassini – Huygens

The Saturn ian moon Mimas ( moon ) | Mimas, photographed by the Cassini – Huygens | Cassini probe in 2005.

* 1655 – Giovanni Domenico Cassini discovers Jupiter's Great Red Spot

Space probes have been placed into orbit around all the five planets known to the ancients: first Mars ( Mariner 9, 1971 ), then Venus ( Venera 9, 1975 ; but landings on Venus and atmospheric probes were performed even earlier ), Jupiter ( Galileo, 1995 ), Saturn ( Cassini / Huygens, 2004 ), and most recently Mercury ( MESSENGER, March 2011 ), and have returned data about these bodies and their natural satellites.

* 2004 – The Cassini – Huygens spacecraft becomes the first to orbit Saturn.

Newer probes such as Cassini – Huygens and the Mars Exploration Rovers are highly autonomous and use on-board computers to operate independently for extended periods of time.

However, the Cassini – Huygens mission fly-by of Venus in 1999 detected no signs of lightning at all.

# REDIRECT Cassini – Huygens

Cassini – Huygens – First Saturn orbiter and first Titan lander

* Cassini – Huygens – 15 October 1997 – First Saturn orbiter and first outer planet lander

A dual technique magnetometer is part of the Cassini – Huygens mission to explore Saturn.

* Cassini orbiter, part of the Cassini – Huygens space probe

* Animation of Cassini Huygens gravitational sling shot

The apparent closeness of the two moons is an illusion, Janus ( right ) is about 40, 000 km farther from Cassini – Huygens | Cassini than Epimetheus ( left ).

A later study published in 2010 revealed that imaging of Rhea from the Cassini mission was inconsistent with the predicted properties of the rings, suggesting that some other mechanism is responsible for the magnetic effects that had led to the ring hypothesis.

* Mars Pathfinder, Mars Exploration Rover and the Cassini probe to Saturn use a k of 15 and a rate of 1 / 6 ; this code performs about 2 dB better than the simpler k = 7 code at a cost of 256 × in decoding complexity ( compared to Voyager mission codes ).

There have been many other approaches over the course of the Cassini mission, and future flybys may yield additional data.

In April 1791, the academy's Metric Commission confided this mission to Jean-Dominique de Cassini, Adrien-Marie Legendre and Pierre Méchain.

The Huygens probe was an atmospheric entry probe carried to Saturn's moon Titan as part of the Cassini – Huygens mission.

ESA announced that the program error was a mistake on their part, the missing command was part of a software program developed by ESA for the Huygens mission and that it was executed by Cassini as delivered.

For communicating with the Deep Space Network, the spacecraft transmitted data across the x-band using a 0. 6-meter parabolic high-gain antenna, medium-gain antenna ( MGA ) and low-gain antennas ( LGA ) depending on mission phase, and a 15-watt transponder design originally intended for the Cassini spacecraft.

The adjectival form of Mimas is Mimantean or Mimantian, and this is accepted by the Cassini mission at JPL.

* Cassini mission page – Mimas

A pellet of Plutonium-238 | < sup > 238 </ sup > Pu O < sub > 2 </ sub > to be used in an RTG for either the cassini spacecraft | Cassini or galileo spacecraft | Galileo mission.

* Cassini – Huygens, mission to Saturn and Titan

* Huygens probe is the portion of the Cassini – Huygens mission which landed on Saturn's moon Titan on January 14, 2005

Due to the recent interest in Titan, associated with the Cassini – Huygens mission, its ionosphere is perhaps the most thoroughly modeled today.

tDR was also commissioned to create a logo and general graphic design by French musician-producer Julien Civange for its Music2Titan mission to take music on the European Space Agency's Cassini – Huygens probe to the moon Titan in 2004.

The radio transponder designed for the Cassini – Huygens mission was used as a cost-saving measure.

It is assumed that the number of damaged, but unrecoverable images from the Cassini mission is about 0. 01 % or less.

Along with his work as principal investigator on the MER ( Mars Exploration Rovers ), he is also a co-investigator on the 2003 Mars Express and 2005 Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter missions, a member of the Gamma-Ray Spectrometer Flight Investigation Team for the Mars Odyssey mission, and a member of the imaging team for the Cassini to Saturn.