The Cassini-Huygens Visit to Saturn: An Historic Mission to the Ringed Planet

Very comprehensive book. Covers everything you might want to know about the mission. It can get fairly dense and technical, but it’s accessible if youre into this stuff. I find it so interesting to learn about the engineering decisions that were made to get good science halfway across solar system. Cassini was a beast. The thing was the size of a truck with 70 pounds of plutonium keeping the systems powered and warm. The Huygens probe was an ambitions addition and international partnership with ESA. I never could find a "pop science" account of this mission, so this book scratched my itch.

Un testo estremamente istruttivo e molto ben congegnato per offrire una eccezionale visione della pianificazione a lunghissimo tempo in avanti di una esplorazione spaziale che presenta di per sé limiti e difficoltà incredibili di comunicazione e di verifica di quanto stia accadendo a milioni di kilometri di distanza. Un successo che credo sia stato ben poco pubblicizzato ma che per me resta al vertice delle capacità tecniche e scientifiche dell'umanità. Ingenuity su MArte oggi ne è forse il maggior beneficiario.Un testo Bellissimo da leggere e interessantissimo.

Quick delivery and book in great condition.

A fascinating and very well researched book. As already mentioned by a previous review, much of the book covers the planning and preparation for this mission, but I found this to be very interesting in itself, as it is an aspect that is rarely covered, and certainly not by the media. I have often wondered just went on 'behind the scenes' of these incredibly expensive and pioneering spaceflights, and this book answers those questions in abundance, and in a way that is not difficult to understand. An excellent book.

Very comprehensive description of the Cassini probe, but a lot of the book is spent on the project planning/design/politics of probe and also the actual journey to Saturn (for example, there is a lot of data on the various orbits the probe took of Venus, Earth, and Mars to gain speed). It's only the last couple of chapters that discuss the probe's findings.