8 October 2008
25km Enceladus Flyby!
Posted by Ryan Anderson
Tomorrow the Cassini spacecraft will fly within 25 km of the surface of Enceladus. Yes, you read that right. Twenty five kilometers. Not 2500, not 250. Holy crap.
I’ll let you read about all the details over at the Planetary Society blog. I just wanted to call attention to how freakin’ amazing it is to be able to command a spacecraft that is currently ~1,525,300,000 km away from Earth and traveling at thousands of meters per second to fly within 25 kilometers of a tiny moon that is orbiting Saturn and also going at thousands of meters per second! Wow. NASA engineers are awesome.