NASA last week named University College London as a key experimenter
for a mission to Saturn in 1996. That mission, Cassini, will be a joint
undertaking by NASA and the European Space Agency.
The agencies will study the gas planet and its icy moon, Titan. UCL’s
involvement will be to probe the interactions between the plasma of the
solar wind and Saturn’s magnetic field. Although plasma consitutes about
99 per cent of the matter in the Universe, it is rarely seen on Earth, except
in fluorescent tubes or nuclear fusion experiments.