21st Century Complete Guide to the NASA Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn and Titan, with Spacecraft Image Files and Movie Clips (Planetary Exploration CD-ROM)

This electronic book on CD-ROM provides a comprehensive guide to the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft mission to explore Saturn and its moon, Titan. With its stunning rings and dozen of moons, Saturn is an intriguing planet for many reasons. Barely smaller than Jupiter, it formed four billion years ago and it is made mainly of gas. It is also the only known planet that is less dense than water, meaning that if it could be placed inside an imaginary gigantic bathtub it would float. Saturn has a huge magnetosphere and a stormy atmosphere, with winds clocked at 1,800 kilometers (1,118 miles) per hour near its equator. Of the 31 known moons orbiting Saturn, Titan is the largest. Bigger than the planet Mercury and our own moon, Titan is of particular interest to scientists because it is the only moon in the solar system with its own atmosphere. Launched from Kennedy Space Center on Oct. 15, 1997, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft will reach the Saturnian region in July 2004. The mission is composed of two elements: The Cassini orbiter that will orbit Saturn and its moons for four years, and the Huygens probe that will dive into the murky atmosphere of Titan and land on its surface. The sophisticated instruments onboard these spacecraft will provide scientists with vital data to help understand this mysterious, vast region.

Contents include nearly 500 pre-encounter image files in JPG, GIF, and TIF formats, along with 67 video clips in QuickTime and MPEG formats, with depictions of the spacecraft, instruments, launch, and mission profile. This CD-ROM has over 4,200 pages reproduced using Adobe Acrobat PDF software and Reader software is included. There is no other reference that is as fast, convenient, comprehensive, and portable!

Our CD-ROMs are privately-compiled collections of official public domain U.S. government files and documents - they are not produced by the federal government. They are designed to provide a convenient user-friendly reference work, utilizing the benefits of the Acrobat format to uniformly present thousands of pages that can be rapidly reviewed, searched, or printed without untold hours of tedious searching and downloading. Vast archives of important public domain government information that might otherwise remain inaccessible are available for instant review no matter where you are. This book-on-a-disc makes a superb reference work for scientists, researchers, libraries, schools, students, and home reference!