KSC-97pc246

The Centaur upper stage of the Titan IV expendable launch vehicle that will propel the Cassini spacecraft to Saturn and its moon Titan is unloaded from a jet cargo aircraft at the Skid Strip at Cape Canaveral Air Station (CCAS). The Titan IV is currently scheduled to lift off from Launch Pad 40 at CCAS on October 6. Once deployed from the Centaur upper stage, Cassini will conduct gravity-assist flybys of the planets Venus and Jupiter, then arrive at Saturn in July 2004. Once there, it will perform an orbital survey of Saturn and send the European Space Agency's Huygens Probe into the dense and seemingly Earthlike atmosphere of Titan. The Cassini project is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, California