Ships that pass in the night ...

Well, the close-up photos from Cassini's encounter with Phoebe are now up at www.ciclops.org. It's a moon of Saturn with about the surface area of Greece, and some wonderful-looking cliffs at the top of the full-disc image; they look about ten kilometres tall, though in the low (1% of Lunar) gravity it wouldn't even be difficult to climb them.

But those pictures are all we get; there's only one encounter on the mission, there are no plans to send another probe to Saturn even in the pipeline. The approach images show both hemispheres of the moon, but it looks as if there's really only the one photo at full resolution. We've just added to the state of human ignorance a hundred thousand square kilometres of "here be dragons"; think of it as discovering two islands the size of Ireland, previously vague dots on a map.

I'll be crossing my fingers on July 1st - two ring-plane crossings and the long orbital-insertion burn.

http://uplink.space.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=missions&Number=702298&page=&view=&sb=&o=&fpart=3&vc=1

has the orbital tour, which is surprisingly difficult to find otherwise; with any luck the front page of the paper on October 20th 2004 will have the first radar images of Titan, and by mid-July there ought to be some better-than-Voyager pictures of Mimas appearing.

It's so nice to have an orbiter rather than a fly-past.