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| Cassini Mission to Saturn |
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| This is a small gallery of images from work I did on an animation featuring the Cassini spacecraft (which unfortunately, as far as I know, no one saw). I'm grateful to JPL mission designer David Seal for his help on this project. | |
| Cassini was launched on October 15, 1997 and
arrived at Saturn the first week of July, 2004. I watched the NASA TV coverage of SOI
(Saturn Orbital Insertion) with the same excitement I remember from Apollo. Early images
from this mission have already proved that the synthetic views of Saturn here are too
orange. Cassini carries a probe named Huygens that will be dropped onto the surface of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, in January of 2005. See the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Cassini Home Page for more about the mission. I'm a programmer, damn it, not a modeler, but I think I did a reasonable job this one time. The spacecraft model contains 27,698 polygons and took ten days to build. It's based on two previous computer models (now available in various forms on Dave Seal's web site) and on videotape and still images taken during construction of the real spacecraft. I wrote a custom LightWave shader to render Saturn's ring system. The shader uses a mathematical model of the optical properties of the rings to calculate brightness and transparency at each pixel. The results are compared here with a photograph taken by Voyager 2 in 1981, obtained from the NSSDC Photo Gallery. Online tools at the PDS Rings Node web site
allowed me to figure out the orientation of Saturn and its moons on the day Cassini is
scheduled to arrive. The view here is from a point in space relatively close to the
planet, with the Sun directly behind. The stars are represented by a 9096- The telescope is a 6-inch Dobsonian reflector, probably about f/10. I created this rather simple model before I'd ever seen a Dob in person, or understood exactly how they work. But the research I did for this project inspired me to buy my own. Sky & Telescope and Astronomy magazines have a lot of useful information about buying a first telescope. |
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Credits |
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