Early Cassini Concept: Mariner Mark II

Painting of spacecraft flying close to a comet.
CreditNASA / Jet Propulsion Laboratory - Caltech / Ken Hodges
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Mariner Mark II approaching an asteroid. April, 1984. Painting by Ken Hodges

Description from Dr. Ellis Miner: "There was something called the Mariner Mark II spacecraft that was designed to handle both the CRAF, Comet Rendezvous Asteroid Flyby mission, and the Cassini mission.

"The structures of the two were to be identical. Some of the instruments would be different. We had, of course, different principle investigators and different team leaders for the different investigations on the two missions. But they were both to have a
turntable for fields and particles instruments, a scan platform for the remote sensing instruments.

"Cassini was to have a radar system, which CRAF did not have, but both of them had a three frequency radio science system. In fact, the two missions were run as a single project at JPL up until the time that CRAF was cancelled."