NASA / JPL - Caltech / Space Science Institute / G. Ugarkovic
20 years ago today, it was at 9:12 PM, Pacific Daylight Time, that NASA's Cassini spacecraft entered orbit around the planet Saturn...after a 2.1 billion-mile (3.4 billion-kilometer) journey than began on October 15, 1997.
This was actually a significant event for me on a personal level, as not only was my name on a DVD (which carried a total of 616,420 signatures from people around the world) attached to the side of Cassini, but it also showed that my passion for space exploration didn't wane since I first got excited about NASA missions back in 1989—courtesy of Magellan's launch to Venus and Voyager 2's flyby of Neptune that year.
I was at a hamburger joint hanging out with teammates from my yearbook class (I was a high school senior) the day Cassini and the European Space Agency-built Huygens Titan probe launched aboard a Titan IVB-Centaur rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Station back in 1997.
I was at home on this day in 2004...watching a live webcast of Cassini's Saturn Orbit Insertion maneuver, courtesy of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Pasadena, California. I had just graduated from my college, Long Beach State, over a month earlier!
Back when I first heard about Cassini in 1992 (I was in 6th grade at the time), I didn't think that I could sustain my passion for space travel till 1997, let alone 2004—what with me being preoccupied with life in high school and afterwards. I'm glad that I was wrong!
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