Luna Three Endeavour.

The Soviet Luna three program, these were ambitious and developed to land a man on the moon to collect samples and return him safely to earth before the American Apollo Eagle of 1969. This was a two man process and it is lightly both astronauts perished as there are little to no records or names, just the landing crash site as the other astronaut may have been caught by re entry failure. 
Here are the dimensions of the Russian cutaway drawing of L 3 manned lunar landing it works on the ground as complex as it sounds. The Russian lunar Lander orbited and its lander transmission was recorded 1969 the last radio transmission of a crash lunar 3. Its presume astronaut was killed before impact. There were 3 launches, earliest record was in 1967.05.17 to 1968.04.07 as reports suggest by Russia around trip. As with (Luna 14) been photographed as it lies on its side. The E-6LS was a radio-equipped version of the E-6 used to test tracking and communications networks for the Soviet manned lunar program. 
Otherwise the spacecraft instrumentation was similar to that of the E-6LF and provided data for studies of the interaction between the earth and its lunar mass. The lunar gravitational field, the propagation and stability of radio communications to the spacecraft at different orbital positions, happened as solar charged particles and cosmic rays, and the motion of the Moon. Showing this museums copy the landing leg isn’t as light as the American version this was a hollow aluminium medical frame on a booster. As a heavy landing leg to the cosmonaut's front left. Note the solid rocket motors mounted above each leg that fired downward to settle the LK securely on the surface once the Lander was near the surface. 
Its Yangel OKB tests proved such rockets greatly improved the chances of the rocket not toppling if landing decent was at 30 degree slope or with one leg on a moon rock. The descent ladder is seen on the top of the picture. As an overhead view of the LK Lander this shows Kontakt docking system hexagonal grid like docking structure. Exit the hatch and down the ladder these are to the right. As this is the main view port at front of the Lander. Two high gain antennae at either side provided transmission of television from the lunar surface to earth television in USSR which was more lightly to have been radio hardly any colour televisions. LOK ‘Orbital Module’, docking control station. 

The manoeuvring panel and controls were located where the grey as is its dummy panel. It is flanked by hand controllers. The cosmonaut would look through the cupola to accomplish manual docking with the LK after its return from the lunar surface' never tested. LOK Orbital Module, view down from top of spacecraft toward Soyuz descent module. LK Test Article Sub-scale dynamic test article of a late configuration of the LK, as preserved in the 'TsniiMash Museum'. This shows well the complex shape of the Lunar Cabin and the final LPU configuration. 
LOK Orbital Module. Note the far greater amount of external cabling and connecting plates than in the standard Soyuz. LOK Descent Module detail. The ablative material is far thicker than on the standard Soyuz descent module for the re-entry from lunar distances at twice the energy as that from earth orbit. LOK Descent Module and Orbital Module. 
Note the cupola at the left top of the Orbital Module to secure once docked always the air pressure consern. On the opposite wall are the lunar mapping camera apertures and control station of its interior View of the dome covering the pressurized instrument compartment of the LOK. The cosmonauts' view of the LK view ports and control panels. On the left, environmental control and cabin de pressurisation controls (light blue panel); radio controls (dark green panel); large porthole looking down at lunar surface during landing. The small porthole looked upward for docking. The optical devices that were associated with these portholes are not present in this mock-up. To the right, sequencer panel for calling up sequences for manoeuvres, landing, rendezvous, and docking. This made it look lightly for the soviets to be confident of an home ward bound success

As with guarded switches initiated major events. the Americans built a vacuum oven and flew around the moon as with numerous earth tests.
Here as shown transit vehicle cut in half, one of two hand controllers is visible below the green radio panel. The upper half of this item is the ODOP (Orientation and docking engine section) where the LOK, mounted at the top of the orbital module. The cone at top was had grapples for snagging the hexagonal grid of the large disk on top of the LK to angle. 
Propellants for the orientation and manoeuvring engines were in the tanks in this section. The bottom half of this item is similar to a test installation used on the Soyuz 7K-L1S Most of which were destroyed in the several N1 launches. View of the LOK Block I these are noticeable are the fragile radiator panels and the large manoeuvring thrusters within the forward end. 
The large cylindrical devices are sensors of the attitude control system.  As here it is showing the LOK Block I instrument/rocket module. The fragile radiators, arrayed around the main fuel tank, these are extended away from the body of the spacecraft in flight. The silvery instrument section has numerous patch panels for connecting external wiring. The tapered interstage with stringers connected to the Soyuz descent module. 

As these large 'mooring' thrusters arrayed around this section provided high-authority manoeuvring capability for the LOK in rendezvous and docking with the LK.  Here is LK drawing at Kaluga Cutaway drawing of LK lunar lander, showing position of cosmonaut in cabin. This is its model S5.51 LOK engine The complex plumbing fed numerous smaller attitude control thrusters at the base of the LOK. As the LK two View two view layout drawing of LK lunar lander. Here is its Dynamic Test Model of Early LK Concept. Detail forward view drawing of the LK lunar lander. Detail of the base of the ladder, showing the battery racks below the ladder. Note the shape of the foot pad. Overall view of the LK preserved in the 'Orevo Museum of the Bauman Moscow State Technical University'. 
LK Main Engine The LK engine cluster at the base of the lander. The single chamber RD-858 of the 2,050 kgf main engine is at the centre. It is flanked by the two nozzles of the RD-859 2,045 kgf backup engine. The smaller nozzles are exhaust nozzles for the turbines, these of the pump-fed engines. At landing or takeoff, both the primary and backup engines would ignite. Only if both engines were operating, this meant would one shut down. The thick clamshell doors closed over the engines after landing to insulate them and prevent ingestion of lunar soil go legs back from the moon. Soyuz LOK lunar orbiter. S5.51 LOK engine Side view of the twin-chamber Isayev S5.51. This engine used in the Soyuz 7K-LOK lunar orbiter. The two smaller chambers of the S5.52 supplemental engine protrude beyond the main engine bells to either side. 
LOK Lunar Orbiter The Soyuz 7K-LOK lunar orbiter spacecraft to be used in the L3 lunar landing project complex. Chelomei LK-700 manned direct lunar landing spacecraft - cruise and landed configurations. Soyuz 7K-LOK manned lunar orbit spacecraft. With Krechet Spacesuit for the lunar walk. Front view of the Krechet lunar space suit Krechet Spacesuit. Krechet lunar space suit as displayed at 'NPO Zvezda Museum. As in the Orlan suit still used on Mir, the cosmonaut entered the suit by swinging open a hatch at the rear. The backpack containing the life support system was housed in the backpack which made up into the hatch door. As in Apollo, the gold-coated outer visor of the helmet reflected ultra-violet radiation. The integrated Kretchet design meant that no external hoses were required as in the American Space Suits. As yet lunar three landing site hasn't showed up on NASA satellite imaging. Just a voice recording that they were going to fast, as that would make for another resemblant crater.  

The Luna Program.

There seems to have been at least a few failed Russian attempts to land on the moon, then success.

As here is photo from the Russian luna orbiter with failed return from the moon, as the remains of Luna 9 and 13 have yet to be imaged by NASA’s LRO. It’s yet to be seen if it was actually the Moon that wrecked their mission but probably atmospheric pressure they used. Luna 24 success as the last pair of Luna spacecraft set to be captured by NASA sometime in the near future by the NASA satellite, we’ll find out soon enough. Here are England observations with Sir Bernard notes change in the orbit of Luna 15 to take it closer to the US landing site and later reports a rumour from a "well-informed source in Moscow" that the craft is about to land.
The recordings came from Jodrell's Lovell radio telescope, which were hidden in archives until researchers found them. This show the Russian craft orbited the Moon and crash-landed onto its surface at 15:50 on July 21 –1969 just a few hours before the Americans lifted off as hysterical event.Luna 3 went into orbit and sent back the first pictures of the Moon’s far side. In the newly released recordings, which were made over three days, Sir Bernard, the founder of Jodrell Bank, can be heard narrating events with conversation from the Apollo 11 astronauts in the background.
People in Jodrell's control room can then be heard shouting "It's landing" and "it's going down much too fast" as they track Luna 15's final moments before it crashes. A voice is later heard saying: "I say, this has really been drama of the highest order." The recordings have been released by The University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Moon landings. While the United States was fighting to get a man on the Moon by the end of the 1960s, the Soviet Union was working hard to return a sample of lunar soil as part of the robotic Luna program. Some missions were successful and others weren’t, but for decades no one was really sure why. That’s changed: Last week, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed the remnants of two Luna missions, Luna 23 and 24, and almost 50 years later is helping solve the mysteries these missions opened.

The Luna program was conceived in 1955 by Sergei Korolev, the elusive Soviet Chief Designer responsible for the USSR’s early successes in space.
He proposed building a multi-stage version of the R-7 rocket (the one that would launch Sputnik into orbit two years later) that would be powerful enough to deliver a payload to the Moon. He envisioned Soviet probes orbiting, landing on, and photographing the Moon before the Americans. The eventual goal would be for a Luna spacecraft to return a soil sample. The sample return spacecraft consisted of a descent stage, an ascent stage, and an Earth-return capsule. The entire suite was designed to land on the surface where an instrument would gather the lunar sample and place it in the Earth-return capsule. The ascent stage would fire its main engine and send the mission’s payload back to Earth leaving the descent stage on the surface.
Success came early to the Luna program. In 1959, Luna 2 became the first spacecraft to reach the lunar surface when it crashed at a point in the North near Mare Imbrium (the Sea of Clouds). Luna 3 went into orbit and sent back the first pictures of the Moon’s far side the same year. Luna 15 marks the Soviet Union’s intersection with Apollo; Luna 15, the third designed for a sample collection and return, was launched three days before Apollo 11. On July 20, 1969, as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made history’s first manned lunar landing, the orbiting Luna 15 fired its retrorockets to descend towards the surface. Unfortunately, it crashed while the Apollo 11 crew was partway through their historic moonwalk.

Luna 23 met a similar fate.
Launched on October 28, 1974, it malfunctioned halfway through its mission and ended up crashing on the surface in the Mare Crisium (the Sea of Crisis in the northwest on the Earth-facing side). The spacecraft stayed in contact with Earth after its hard landing, but it couldn’t get a sample. Mission scientists expected the spacecraft had tipped over as a result of its landing, but without a way to image the moon at a high resolution, they weren’t able to confirm, and the mystery endured. It turns out they were indeed right. The whole spacecraft is still on the surface, its ascent engine never fired, and high resolution image from LRO’s cameras show the spacecraft lying on its side. LRO also captured images of Luna 24, the mission that picked up where Luna 23 left off by landing, collecting, and returning samples from a point less than 2.5km away on 18 August 1976. After less than 24 hours,
Luna 24 fired its ascent stage, and sent a 0.375 pound sample of lunar regolith to scientist on Earth.
The sample puzzled scientists — it had unexpected characteristics based on the understanding of Mare Crisium geology at the time. The new picture of the spacecraft’s landing point has shed light on why the sample differed from the observed lunar environment around it. Images from NASA’s LRO’s Camera have solved the mystery by putting the lander in geographic and geological context. Luna 24 landed near a crater that had brought material up from ancient lava flows. The spacecraft returned a sample not from its environment, but from beneath the surface that hadn’t been exposed to space nearly as long. This accounts for the nearly 40-year-old mystery.

Twelve men and two Rovers.

A Back to back mission to space not as we know it, NASA processed its Data didn't consider back up data neither getting its lunar samples back, as video camera became fixed cameras achievement.
today use gyroscopes turns craft efficiently 'That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind', but most listeners claim they can't hear the first 'a' and the statement has become best known without it. As “These tapes are not in the system," Nafzger said. "We are certainly open to finding them Moon landing tapes got erased, NASA admits to Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor. As Washington had the original recordings of the first humans landing on the moon 40 years ago. Just were erased and re-used, but newly restored copies of the original broadcast look even better, NASA officials said on Thursday. Neil Armstrong, Edwin Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins
As NASA released the first glimpses of a complete digital make-over of the original landing footage that clarifies the blurry and grainy images of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the surface of the moon. The full set of recordings, being cleaned up by Burbank, California-based Lowry Digital, then disclosed. The preview is available at www.nasa.gov. NASA admitted in 2006 that no one could find the original video recordings of the July 20, 1969, landing.
The lander remains on site as captured by satellite preserved in its solar radiated dust, thought to have been much deeper solar wind. As it will always sit on the corona of the lunar surface. Also Russia failures with one earlier attempt, this was by sayauz three. With an earlier landing to beat NASA, probably has a Russian cosmonaut still inside on the moon, comes with a total 3 crashed vehicles, with only one manned expedition to collect their first lunar soil sample.

As her Majesty Elizabeth took a keen interest, a question was asked, why did the astronauts’ proceed to come up off the moon when they were landing.
This showed up on the England’s radar system during touchdown.  Answer is as seen in the video where one can clearly see the crater Neil Armstrong desperately avoided as they didn’t want to land in. Yes the crater is huge and one can see they didn’t want to venture near it either. It would need a lot of digging for a long time and that’s only to get out of it. As the astronauts’ clearly looking into it on video to the size of the crater, on decent Neil heart rate jumped as his vitals were monitored by the ground team.
Armstrong was interviewed by BBC talks about pilot skills he said if suit ripped trouble or big risk was docking for the return journey as it was a right first time right manoeuvre. Maybe not his exact words but one can see in tapes if they have margin for error was minimal. They pointed the connected craft, before the Earth for their routine journey back.
Also on the Lunar surface they had to jammed a metal pen into pull button switch, to start engine inside lunar module as the button flew onto the floor a wee bit of luck. Since the loss of tapes these would give NASA an insight as to a day in outer space with no radiation shield. Richard Nafzger, an engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, who oversaw television processing at the ground-tracking sites during the Apollo 11 mission, has been looking for them. The good news is he found where they went. The bad news is they were part of a batch of 200,000 tapes that were degaussed by magnetically erased and re-used valuable data just to save very little money. One can clearly see the crater to the right of this photo here.

 

"The goal was live TV," Nafzger told a news conference.
"We should have had a historian running around saying 'I don't care if you are ever going to use them we are going to keep them' Nafzger said NASA has found good copies in the archives of CBS news and some recordings called kinescopes found in film vaults at Johnson Space Center. Many tests carried out on ground and Neil was hospitalised in lunar module crash, in Florida and he was nearly replaced in the program. Lowry, best known for restoring old Hollywood films, has been digitizing these along with some other bits and pieces to make a new rendering of the original landing. Nafzger does not worry that using a Hollywood-based company might fuel the fire of conspiracy theorists who believe the entire lunar program that landed people on the moon six times between 1969 and 1972 was staged on a movie set or secret military base and some still do as survey it worried NASA.

"As this company is restoring historic video. It mattered not to me where the company was from," Nafzger said. "The conspiracy theorists are going to believe what they are going to believe," added Lowry Digital Chief Operating Officer Mike Inchalik. As there may be some unofficial copies of the original broadcast out there somewhere that were taken from a NASA video switching center in Sydney, Australia, the space agency said. Nafzger said someone else in Sydney made recordings too. "These tapes are not in the system," Nafzger said. "We are certainly open if as to finding a trace of them."

Venus Akatsuki Probe

Geopolitics has also become an obstacle. Last December, NASA expressed interest in a Venera-D collaboration. Then Russia invaded Crimea and NASA drew back from most joint operations.
funding for the Venera-D project, envisioning a long-duration Lander on the surface of Venus, which could function 30 days. Speaking at the 5th International Aerospace Congress in Moscow, on August 29, 2006, Deputy Chief of the Federal Space Agency, Vitaly Davydov, listed Venera-D among high-priority exploration projects to be given funds by the Russian government. However level and timing of funding projected by the government would not enable the launch the mission before 2016. As Mars landing return has been given a top priority show a Russian focus. In 2012, the Indian space agency, ISRO, announced that a Venus orbiter would be launched next year, but no details have emerged since then. That leaves the Japanese space agency, JAXA. Its Akatsuki probe tried to enter Venus orbit in 2010. Though it was unsuccessful, due to engine damage, the craft is swinging back for another try.
 Mars, meanwhile, enjoys much greater popularity. Two spacecraft are en route, and at least four more are set to launch in the next decade (see chart). Venus Express only exists because ESA threw together spare parts from its Mars Express mission. The difference in attitude to our two nearest planets is partly technological. On the surface of sweltering Venus, robotic probes survive for no more than a few hours. Even then, power is a problem. Other probes use solar panels, but thick clouds makes this impossible on Venus. The cloud barrier might be a mental block, too. “Imagining ourselves going there is easier on Mars. That’s a big part of planet Venus ” says Grinspoon its atmosphere which make any mission easier given right deployment for example air-brakes. 

Venus death dive to unlock secrets of Earth’s evil twin On its final plunge, the Venus Express probe will fly deeper than ever before –but a return mission could tell us more about climate change and alien life.

As with end of Venus Express as a blank have to say goodbye to Earth’s fiery twin. European spacecraft will start a series of dives into the hellish atmosphere of Venus, marking the beginning of the end for the only probe now orbiting the planet. The dives will take the craft, called Venus Express, deeper into the atmosphere than it has gone before, allowing it to record conditions in a largely unstudied region.
It will also be a test of the spacecraft’s endurance as it drags itself through the planet’s thick air, which will provide valuable data for future interplanetary missions. Venus Express may not survive the month-long campaign of daredevil plunges. Even if it does, the craft will run out of fuel later this year. "No dedicated probe is due to launch in the next decade", and a damaged Japanese craft has just a slim chance of making it there next year. But there is still so much to discover about our neglected neighbour.
Better knowledge of Venus could help answer two of the most important questions in modern science: how is Earth’s climate changing, and are we alone in the universe? “Venus is so similar to Earth and yet so different,” says project scientist Håkan Svedhem at the European Space Agency (ESA). “One really needs to understand Venus to understand all terrestrial planets.” At first glance, Venus seems nothing like Earth. It is shrouded in a haze of carbon dioxide, with toxic sulphuric clouds and temperatures topping 450 °C. Its surface is bone dry, and the air pressure is high enough to rupture the hull of a submarine.

However, Venus is almost exactly the same size and mass as Earth, and is made from similar materials. It is thought to have started out with a water-rich atmosphere like Earth’s, which may even have made the surface briefly habitable. But Venus is closer to the sun and lacks a global magnetic field, which is what protects Earth from our star’s harshest rays. Geoffrey Landis at the NASA John Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, is working on Venus-specific technology, including electronics that operate at high temperatures and a solar-powered plane that would direct a rover on the ground. Perhaps an ambitious rover mission is key to reigniting interest in Venus. “We’ve discovered how fascinating Mars is because we have been able to land on the surface and rove around,” says Landis. “If we could drive around on Venus, we would discover: wow, it is just as interesting as Mars.” Without this shield, young Venus was blasted by radiation that boiled away most of the water in its air, leaving dense carbon dioxide and triggering a runaway greenhouse effect.

“Venus is like a controlled experiment  what would happen if you took another Earth and started it off in slightly different conditions,” says David Grinspoon, a NASA astrobiologist who worked on Venus Express. During its eight years in orbit, the Venus Express mission has made many discoveries about our “evil twin”, most notably about the planet’s wind patterns. “It has really been our first weather satellite on another planet,” says Grinspoon. “A lot of advantages have come from observing it over a long period of time and seeing the patterns of changes in the atmosphere.” Oddly, feeding atmospheric data from Venus Express into a variety of climate models throws up some surprising results.
While these simulations can faithfully reproduce conditions on Earth, they all fail to recreate the climate of Venus, says Svedhem. Figuring out why could tell us about the underlying processes of climate change, and perhaps improve our models of climate on Earth. Such knowledge would also be useful to astronomers hunting for Earth-like worlds elsewhere in the galaxy. At the moment, we are able to identify planets with a similar mass and radius to Earth that orbit their stars at the right distance to support liquid water. Technically, Venus falls into this category, so worlds that look friendly from afar may be hellish up close. “If we can’t figure out Venus, we have no chance of predicting conditions on exoplanets,” says Grinspoon.

Daring dives for its swansong almost like a battery scoop and out, Venus Express will perform aerobraking, a way to reduce the speed of a spacecraft and so reduce its altitude. This lets an orbiting probe get much closer to a planet’s surface and study it in greater detail.

2015 Venus Express will take its first dip into the clouds, where it will record the effects of friction from the atmosphere. During a series of these dives until 11 July it will also take readings on the atmosphere’s density and composition. ESA has never attempted aerobraking before, so lessons from the Venus experiment will be valuable for future probes. For instance, the agency plans to use the technique when the Exo Mars satellite arrives at the Red Planet in 2017, says ESA’s Olivier Witasse. Learning more about could also be useful for human missions. A related manoeuvre, called aero capture, would help spacecraft land on Mars or return to Earth without needing prohibitively large landing rockets. “People think the hard part of space travel is going as fast as you can,” says Grinspoon.

“There is also the hard part of slowing down when you get places, because you need a big rocket for that or you just keep going.” Venus Express survives the ordeal, the plan is to take the probe back into a higher orbit and continue observations until its fuel runs out. Many questions will remain unanswered, including whether the planet is still volcanically active, and whether life could have thrived in the planet’s past.
However, neither NASA nor ESA has plans for another dedicated Venus mission and other space
agencies hold out  for only faint hope. Every child likes space reality, as for the past decade Russia has been talking about a follow-up. This is to mark the Soviet Union’s successful Venera series of probes from the 1960s and 70s. “It is not doing very well,” says Oreg Korablev in the Space Research Institute in Moscow. “The Russian programme was dominated by Phobos Grunt Martian lunar exploration which failed, with china on board it took a decade of a build, because of its return journey. Both nations missed out due to its many as complex failures and laps of calculations an nod with pre-run it became an over laden catastrophe.” The mission, known as Venera-D, is set for a 2024 launch at its earliest.

Enceladus Saturn Moon

Could alien life exist in huge ocean beneath Saturn’s moon Enceladus?

Another portrait of Earth, but this pale blue dot is a succinct moon in a summary of who we were on," Linda Spilker, Cassini spacecraft lead scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. A huge ocean has been found under the icy crust of Enceladus and all the signs suggest it could harbour alien life The hunt for extra-terrestrial life in our galaxy moved a step closer after Nasa said a huge ocean lies beneath the frozen crust of Saturn’s moon Enceladus.
Scientists said that the slight wobble of the moon could only be driven by a huge body of water sloshing under the surface as the satellite orbits around its planet. The ocean, is likely to cover the whole globe, according to data from Nasa’s Cassini mission, which is exploring Saturn’s system. As Enceladus, Saturn's sixth largest moon, has always been a good candidate for life in the solar system. Water seen spraying from its surface was previously found to have the correct acidity for microbes to thrive and the same sodium chloride salt as oceans on Earth. Previous analysis of Cassini data suggested there was a lens-shaped body of water, or sea, underlying the moons near its south polar region. As can remove ethylene in an unodorox can lengthen shelf life of harvested crops But new gravity data collected during the spacecraft's several close passes over the south polar region show the sea must be far larger. Nasa originally thought the liquid water must be confined to the south pole.

The finding implies the fine spray of water vapour, icy particles and simple organic molecules.
Cassini has observed coming from fractures near the moon's south pole is being fed by this vast liquid water reservoir. "If the surface and core were rigidly connected, the core would provide so much dead weight the wobble would be far smaller than we observe it to be," said Matthew Tiscareno, a Cassini participating scientist at the SETI Institute, Mountain View, California. "This proves that there must be a global layer of liquid separating the surface from the core," he said.
Enceladus is the sixth-largest of the moons of Saturn and was discovered in 1789 by William Herschel. It has a circumference of 984 miles (1,584km) It is thought that the liquid water will have contact with the moon’s rocky core, which means that elements useful for life – such as sulphur and potassium – should be within the ocean. "There are definitely regions on Enceladus where the conditions are such that life could exist. You have liquid water, you have chemicals and you have heat. And that is enough for life. To my mind, this is the best place we can expect to find life elsewhere in the solar system," Nikolai Brilliantov, a mathematician at Leicester University told space lorn. New data suggests the ocean covers the whole of Enceladuswill be a vast. As could make human habitation possible Cassini scientists analyzed more than seven years' worth of images of Enceladus taken by the spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn since mid-2004.

They carefully mapped the positions of features on Enceladus -- mostly craters -- across hundreds of images, in order to measure changes in the moon's rotation with extreme precision. As a result, they found Enceladus has a tiny, but measurable wobble as it orbits Saturn.
Because the icy moon is not perfectly spherical -- and because it goes slightly faster and slower during different portions of its orbit around Saturn -- the giant planet subtly rocks Enceladus back and forth as it rotates. The team plugged their measurement of the wobble, called a libration, into different models for how Enceladus might be arranged on the inside, including ones in which the moon was frozen from surface to core. The mechanisms that might have prevented Enceladus' ocean from freezing remain a mystery. Thomas and his colleagues suggest a few ideas for future study that might help resolve the question, including the surprising possibility that tidal forces due to Saturn's gravity could be generating much more heat within Enceladus than previously thought. Cassini is scheduled to make a close flyby of Enceladus on Oct. 28, in the mission's deepest-ever dive through the moon's active plume of icy material. The spacecraft will pass a mere 30 miles (49 kilometers) above the moon's surface. The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. The research is presented in a paper published online this week in the journal Icarus. As new stunning images taken on Nasa Cassini spacecraft's from this mission to Saturn. Nasa's Cassini spacecraft, nearly 900 million miles from Earth, has turned its gaze away from Saturn and its entourage of moons to take a picture of its home planet. The image shows Earth as a very small, blue-tinged dot – paler and tinier than in other photos –overshadowed by the giant Saturn's rings in foreground. "We can't see individual continents or people with this.