Cassini turns to flyby Phoebe

The spacecraft successfully altered its course to set up a June 11 flyby of Saturn's outermost moon, Phoebe, en route to the ringed planet, NASA said.

The Cassini spacecraft successfully altered its course to set up a June 11 flyby of Saturn's outermost moon, Phoebe, en route to the ringed planet, NASA said on Friday.

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The six-minute course correction manoeuvre performed on Thursday was a critical first checkout of the spacecraft's propellant pressurisation system after nearly five years of dormancy, said Todd Barber, a Cassini propulsion engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

"It sets the stage for Saturn orbit insertion on June 30," he said in a statement.

Cassini will have to perform a 96-minute burn that day to become the first spacecraft to go into orbit around Saturn. The spacecraft has travelled 3.4 billion kilometres since the US-European mission was launched from Florida on October 15, 1997, carrying a European-built probe named Huygens that will be released in December to parachute through the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan in January.

The mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.

Oddly shaped and with a dark surface, Phoebe orbits in the opposite direction from the motion of most other bodies in the solar system. Scientists believe the backwards motion indicates it is an object from the distant Kuiper Belt that was captured by Saturn.