It’s been around 18 years since the Cassini-Huygens deep space probe was launched and 20 years since TRAK completed deliveries of a suite of products to customers in the EU and the USA. In the interim Cassini has travelled around 3.5B Km and is currently operating in orbit around Saturn.
After an extraordinarily successful primary mission, during which the Huygens probe was deployed and landed on Saturn’s moon Titan, the probe has continued to transmit data and images which excite and inform.
TRAK supplied a number of high and low power waveguide, strip line and coaxial products which were used on the Huygens lander and the Cassini mothership including Ku and C-Band components integrated into communications, radar, altimeter and other RF equipments.
Mission facts
- Launch: October 15, 1997
- Distance traveled to reach Saturn: 3.5 billion km (2.2 billion mi)
- One-way speed-of-light time from Saturn to Earth during orbital tour: 67 to 85 minutes
- Jupiter flyby: December 30, 2000 at 10 million km (6 million mi)
- Saturn arrival date: June 30, 2004 PDT(July 1, 2004, UTC)
- Primary mission: 4 years
- Huygens probe Titan descent date: January 14, 2005
- Partners: NASA, European Space Agency (ESA), Italian space agency Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI); total of 17 countries involved
- 5000: the number of people who contributed and worked on the Cassini-Huygens mission
- Cost of mission: $3.27 billion, of which U.S. contribution is $2.6 billion and European partners’ contribution $660 million