Cassini to fly-by Titan and Huygens landing site
After three amazing close encounters with the icy moons Tethys, Hyperion and Dione, the NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini spacecraft is returning to Titan for its ninth planned fly-by with Saturn’s large atmosphere-shrouded moon.
The closest approach to Titan occurs on Friday, 28 October 2005, at an altitude of only 1353 kilometres above the surface and at a speed of 5.9 kilometres per second.
While flying over Titan’s cloud tops, Cassini’s radar instrument will peer through the moon's hazy layers to provide new clues on the nature of the surface seen by ESA’s Huygens probe, which landed there in January 2005. The radar will be imaging the dark terrain west of Xanadu, which includes the Huygens landing site.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a co-operative project between NASA, ESA and ASI, the Italian space agency.
