Space exploration looking up

Philadelphia Inquirer: Don't look now, but 2004 is shaping up as one of the most memorable years ever for space exploration.
In February, we had a veritable convention of probes from the United States, Britain and Europe gathering around Mars. The U.S. rovers Spirit and Opportunity, which have been rumbling around Mars since January, are still sending back info, beyond the predicted length of their missions.
Two weeks ago, we saw those private-enterprise cowboys, Scaled Composites of Mojave, Calif., shoot a dude into the exosphere, a true first in space annals. There's a lot more where that came from.
And on Thursday, the massive Cassini-Huygens space probe eased into an orbit around Saturn.
Flying bus
Cassini is a real trash-truck of a thing, the biggest interplanetary craft ever (12,600 pounds, the size and weight of a school bus, it's often said). It's a $3.3 billion collaboration among the United States and 16 other nations. It's bristling with gadgets to do everything from measuring Saturn's magnetic fields to releasing the Huygens probe to land on Titan, a moon of Saturn's thought to have atmosphere like Earth's when Earth was young.
We speak cavalierly of matters that actually are unbelievable. To get into orbit, Cassini had to ascend through the rings, then fire its engine for 95 minutes to then descend through the rings again and settle into place. It was a teeth-gritting process, commanded at a distance of 900 million miles plus, so unimaginably far that radio signals take 80 minutes to get there from here, and vice versa.
And so far, it's working splendidly. Cassini already has transmitted heart-stopping photos of Saturn. We have seen the moon Phoebe close enough to determine that it is probably a captured asteroid. And, in photos that would win awards if they were paintings, Cassini has sent back images of Saturn's rings, showing "density waves," ripple-patterns in the rings caused by gravitational waves.
And we'll see much more, especially when little Huygens hunkers down on Titan, an encounter scheduled for December. If nothing else, this massive project shows us how sheer vision and brainpower can bring us closer to undreamed-of beauty, especially when we sidle up to Saturn, loveliest object in a lovely solar system.