Cassini is the largest interplanetary
spacecraft ever built: it is about the size and weight of
an empty 30-passenger school bus.
It will be the first ship to go into
orbit around Saturn, following a 3.4-billion-kilometre trip
from Earth that began when it launched on 15 October 1997.
Signals from the craft now take at least
an hour to reach home, but it can transmit about 500 megabytes
of information every day, enough to fill a CD-ROM.
Cassini will spend four years orbiting
Saturn, and will have 53 close encounters with seven of
the planet's 31 known moons.
The craft is named after the astronomer
Jean-Dominique Cassini (1625-1712), who discovered four
of Saturn's moons.
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