Cassini-Huygens small model by ddThingz

Last crawled date: 3 years, 1 month ago

This is a small model of the Cassini Saturn-orbiting spacecraft and its Huygens Probe. For home or school FDM printing on a flat printer bed, select three files: TeenyCassini-1, TeenyCassini-2, and HuygensProbe. The first two are halves of Cassini that can be glued together, and the Huygens Probe snaps in place and can be removed.
If you print just one half, it makes for a great fridge-magnet or whiteboard-magnet (see second photo)!
For non-FDM printing (such as third-party) the file TeenyCassiniHuygens contains the whole Cassini as one piece, plus a separate Huygens Probe piece in the same file. This is shown on the right side in the first photo, along with the three-piece option on the left side.
This is not an accurate scale model. My intent was to capture some of the familiar spacecraft's key visual cues; it's totally "freehand" rather than a careful, measured replica. That said, all the Optical Remote Sensing telescopic instruments are represented and pointing in the right directions. The fields and particles instruments are all represented, too, if only roughly. That's MIMI INCA just above the hydrazine tank. 'Cept it should be on the centerline, darnit. Oh well. Hey, even the RPWS Langmuir probe is there, represented by the steep pyramid under the HGA.
The actual spacecraft measures 6.8 m in length, so this model is on the order of 1/100 scale size. Scale mass is a different story; loaded, Cassini/Huygens mass at liftoff was a little over 6,000 kg.
Cassini is in its final months at Saturn. Be sure to see http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov
This page can be found via the redirect http://tiny.cc/TeenyCassini