Cassini spacecraft nears Saturn

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) -- Saturn and its rings are growing large in the view of the international Cassini spacecraft, which is nearing a rendezvous with the giant planet after years of travel across the solar system.
Cassini, carrying the European-built Huygens probe, was about 9.9 million miles from Saturn on Thursday, and officials said all was well with the $3 billion mission.
"The objective of the Cassini-Huygens (mission) is very simple: It's to allow us to rewrite the story of the lord of the rings," Jet Propulsion Laboratory director Charles Elachi quipped at a news conference televised from NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Recent images sent to Earth from Cassini show Saturn's subtly striped atmosphere and details of its rings.
Cassini, which was developed and assembled at JPL, will fly by Saturn's outermost moon, Phoebe, next week and at the end of the month will fire its rocket in a maneuver to put it into orbit around the ringed planet for at least four years of observation.
Robert Mitchell, the JPL Cassini program manager, said the spacecraft had been put through a complete test of the orbital insertion procedure -- without actually firing the rocket -- "and the sequence clocked out just fine."
Jean-Pierre Lebreton, the project manager for the European Space Agency's Huygens project, said he was confidently looking forward to the probe's mission. Huygens will be released from Cassini in December to enter the atmosphere of the moon Titan in January.
Cassini was launched from Florida in 1997 on a 2.2 billion-mile journey to Saturn.