ABSTRACT
A joint effort of NASA and the European and Italian space agencies, the Cassini orbiter and Huygens probe were launched in 1997 to make a 934-million-mile trip (10 times the distance to the sun) to visit Saturn, its majestic rings, and its 31 known moons. Having traveled 2.2 billion real miles to enter orbit around Saturn in 2004, Cassini is the most highly instrumented and scientifically capable planetary spacecraft ever flown.
