Spare a Xmas wish for Cassini

[pasiphae]

http://www.space.com/searchforlife/h...an_041223.html

On December 24th, 2004, at 7:08 PM Pacific Standard Time, the Cassini spacecraft will release a probe that has hitched a ride all the way from Earth out to Saturn. The Huygens Probe, named after the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens, who discovered Titan and Saturn's rings in the 17th century and built by the European Space Agency, will spend 22 days traveling to its rendezvous with Saturn's mysterious moon Titan on January 14th. Titan is one of the remaining puzzles of the solar system - while Cassini's imaging cameras and radar instrument have begun to reveal the details of its surface, the Huygens probe will be the first spacecraft to venture beneath Titan's thick clouds

[pasiphae]

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news146.html

There's a one in three hundred chance this asteroid will hit the Earth then. It is 420 m across and if it strikes the Earth it will release an energy of 1,900 Megatons of TNT...