How long would it take to get from Earth to Saturn?
Pioneer 10/11 and Voyager 1/2 spacecrafts took 2 to 3 years to get to Saturn traveling at speeds of 3.3 to 3.6 AU’s per year. Astronomical Unit (AU) is the distance between the Sun and the Earth (almost 93 million miles). If we send a rocket with similar engines it would take the same time to get there. Every year there are advances in technology that make spacecrafts go faster and/or use less fuel. In the future it might be possible to get there a lot sooner. Scientist predict that we could reach 1% of the speed of light (about 1864 miles per second) by the year 2070. At that speed we could reach Saturn in 4.5 days.
Cassini took 7 years. http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/launc… It was launched on 10/15/97 and arrived at Saturn on 7/1/2004. Cassini is a huge spacecraft. It needs a lot of fuel to make dozens of orbit changes to fly by Titan and the other moons it observes and to go above and below the ring plane of Saturn. Therefor it was launched on a relatively slow trajectory which borrowed energy from Earth, twice from Venus and one from Jupiter! Now compare that to New Horizons, the tiny probe on its way to Pluto. It was launched on 1/19/2006 and has done it’s Jupiter flyby already. It will pass the orbit of Saturn on 7/8/08, only two and a half years after launch! OK… so now let’s look into the future. How long would we want a human mission to Saturn to last? Probably five years. Two years out, one year for research and two years back. I don’t think that a human crew should or could be sent out for much longer than
