Oct 15 1997
From The Space Library
The Cassini spacecraft]] lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, beginning a seven-year, 2.2 billion-mile (3.5 billion-kilometer) journey to and around Saturn. After several delays, including a two-day delay immediately before the launch because of high winds, the takeoff was flawless. Before the launch, activists had protested Cassini's fuel source, 72 pounds (33 kilograms) of radioactive plutonium; to calm public anxiety, NASA planned to sample air quality at 25 stations surrounding the launchpad, including several samples taken as far as 10 miles (16 kilometers) away. Additionally, a U.S. Department of Energy aircraft flew through the trailing gases of the rocket booster to make sure that no radioactive material had leaked. The US$3.4 billion mission set out to survey the planet Saturn, its rings, and its moon Titan. Engineers had programmed the Cassini spacecraft]] to conduct a number of "gravity-assist swingbys," flying twice past Venus and once past Earth and Jupiter, to build up the speed necessary to make the long journey to Saturn. About seven years into the mission, NASA planned for Cassini to release a disc-shaped Huygens Probe toward Titan. Throughout the mission, Cassini was to make more than 40 close flybys of Titan, gathering far more vivid images of the moon than ever before. NASA intended Cassini's camera to take more than 300,000 colored pictures of Saturn and its moons. Scientists hoped that the mission would expand considerably the knowledge of the planet gained through the earlier Voyager missions.
President William J. Clinton used his newly bestowed line-item veto power to cut funding for a "reusable space plane." The US$ 10 million appropriation was a priority of the U.S. Air Force Space Command and space officials. In total, Clinton's line-item vetoes trimmed about US$144 million from the 1998 U.S. Department of Defense appropriations bill, less than one-tenth of 0.1 percent of the total bill.
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