Thunderbirds to the rescue on planetary radio.

Hi everyone and welcome I'm mad Kaplan and all I wanted to do as a kid was

read Mad magazine and fly Thunderbird One.

The closest I'm likely to get to the latter is our conversation today with the director

of the new live action Thunderbird's feature film.

Jonathan Frakes is still known to many of us as commander Will Reicker of the Starship Enterprise,

but he has had the helm of several movies now, including Star Trek First Contact.

Our own number one, Bruce Betts, makes it so with another what's-up installment including a new space trivia contest.

Let's get started with Emily. She explains why the Cassini spacecraft now circling Saturn may live long and prosper.

I'll be right back with questions and answers.

A listener asked, I've heard that the Cassini spacecraft is designed to last four years, but could last seven years, which one is true.

The Cassini Spacecraft has a design lifetime of four years, which means that's how long

NASA's budget lasts, and that's how long the engineers are required

to keep the spacecraft alive or else the mission could be called a failure. Like most

engineered objects, if nothing bad happens, Cassini is expected to last well beyond this design lifetime.

In order for that to happen, funds must be appropriated by NASA to continue running the spacecraft and paying the science team in an extended mission.

Depending on several factors, but mostly on how well the navigators do at conserving fuel,

Kacini should easily go into an extended mission of three or four years, and with some good luck she could go on for three times her design lifetime.

The extended mission could be exciting, because having accomplished the mission success goals, engineers and scientists are able to take greater risks with the spacecraft to achieve higher science returns.

What other missions have lasted beyond their warranty? Stay tuned to planetary radio to find out. We won't be talking as much about real space science on this week's show, so here's a very brief

for a view of what's happening around our solar system.

For the first time, Cassini's cameras have resolved many of Saturn's other moons into little

...