Los Angeles – The international Cassini spacecraft went into safe mode this week after successfully passing over a Saturn moon that was the mysterious destination of a deep-space astronaut in Arthur C. Clarke’s novel “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
Cassini flew within 1,000 miles of Iapetus on Monday and snapped images of its rugged, two-toned surface. As it was sending data back to Earth, it was hit by a cosmic ray that caused a power switch to trip. The spacecraft, parts of which were designed and built in Colorado by Lockheed Martin, was not damaged but had to turn off its instruments and relay only limited information.
Mission controllers have since sent commands for Cassini to resume normal transmission, and scientists recovered all the data from the moon flyby.
Iapetus, Saturn’s third-largest moon, gained science-fiction fame in Clarke’s mind-bending novel “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which was developed in concert with Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 movie by the same name.
Clarke surprised the Cassini team with a five-minute video played Tuesday at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Clarke, who lives in Sri Lanka, told scientists he looked forward to viewing photos from the flyby.
