Craft to get closest yet to Saturn and moons

Equipment dropped off by Cassini will study Titan, the planet's largest moon.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
WASHINGTON -- Some call it "Ringworld," the most gorgeous object in the solar system.
It's Saturn, the sixth planet from the sun, and it's about to receive the longest, closest inspection ever to be made of this giant ball of gas, its glittering rings and its many moons.
On May 18, after a voyage of 61/2 years, a $3.2 billion robotic spaceship named Cassini entered Saturn's zone of influence, past the point where the pull of the planet's gravity outweighs the sun's.
On June 11, Cassini will swoop past Phoebe, the most distant of Saturn's 31 known moons.
And on July 1, the spaceship will slip between two of the icy, outer rings and enter orbit around the planet, which is 10 times farther from the sun than Earth is.
You can follow Cassini's progress and see the latest pictures on the Internet at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.
Next four years
Laden with 18 scientific instruments, Cassini will spend the next four years making 76 circuits of Saturn and 45 passes by its biggest moon, Titan, dipping as close as 600 miles from the moon's surface.
Titan is larger than the planet Mercury and our own moon. It fascinates astronomers because it's the only moon to have a dense atmosphere, mostly made up of nitrogen, like Earth's. Some consider chemical reactions on Titan to be a possible key to the origin of life on Earth.
As it passes Titan on Christmas Day, Cassini will drop off a smaller European scientific package, called Huygens, that's supposed to spend three weeks drifting down through the moon's thick orange haze and parachute to the surface Jan. 14.
The Huygens (pronounced HIGH-guns) package is named for Christiaan Huygens, a Dutch astronomer who discovered Titan in 1655. The Cassini spacecraft is named for Giovanni Cassini, a 17th-century French-Italian astronomer who discovered four of Saturn's moons.
If all goes well this winter, Huygens will radio back its findings, possibly confirming recent evidence that lakes or seas of liquid hydrocarbons -- compounds of hydrogen and carbonlike gooey gasoline -- dot its frigid surface.