Titan isn't the only Saturnian satellite Cassini has on its agenda. There are eight targeted flybys of six other Saturnian moons that include Phoebe, Rhea and Dione, as well as the Voyager-examined Iapetus, Hyperion and Enceledus.

Voyager images revealed that Iapetus has two distinct faces: its leading face is dark while the trailing side is reflectively icy. Voyager 2 came within 62,000 mile (100,000 kilometers) of Iapetus, but Cassini will swoop into focus at 621 miles (1,000 kilometers).

"Cassini will find us much more detail to get a better idea of what's going on in that strange moon," said Miner.

Cassini also will focus its eye on the 155 mile-wide (250 kilometer) Enceladus in three fly-bys at a distance of 310 miles (500 km), once again improving on Voyager's 50,000 mile (80,000 kilometer) initial investigation.

"Cassini will help us look at the whole picture of Saturn as a deductive process, to find specific answers to these interesting properties," said Matson. "The whole system doesn't yield answers today. Something in how we picture the system will have to change for us to answer questions about the resurfacing of those satellites and for Saturn as a whole."

Another mystery scientists hope to clarify, is how Saturn's magnetic field is generated. The magnetic fields of all the other planets in the solar system are generated from complicated internal electric currents resulting from a significant angle between each planet's magnetic and rotation axes. But the angle between these two axes on Saturn is less than a degree.

Voyager flew past Saturn in eight months, but Cassini will orbit the planet 75 times in four years. Calling Voyager's surveillance, "just an initial look," Miner said he doesn't, " believe the alignment will hold out under greater scrutiny."

Miner, who worked on the Saturn portion of the Voyager mission and is looking forward to "going back" to Saturn again as Cassini's project scientist , said these and other scientific mysteries might be clarified because Cassini will be able to gather so much more information than Voyager.

"Saturn is a remarkable planetary system," Owen said. "An awful lot of interesting physics is going on there that we don't really understand yet."

Of course, 20 years of technological development will help Cassini scientists gather more data than Voyager ever could. For instance, Cassini uses computer chips for data storage, while Voyager used computer tapes. This alone will allow Cassini to store almost a million times more information.

Because Cassini has so much more brain-power, its navigational abilities are much more advanced than Voyager. The old spacecraft had a tenth-of-a-degree field of vision that it used to find stars and their position in relation to the Sun. From that, scientists on the ground could control the direction it traveled. But Cassini's steering vision is 15-degrees wide and compares what it sees to a star map that Cassini uses to steer itself.

Cassini also has a tracking technology that will allow it to "lock on" to moving objects and keep them in perfect view. This eliminates the need for scientists to steer the craft blindly.

"When you don't have a person behind the lens," Ellis said, "it is handy to have an camera that tracks your subjects automatically. We had to point the camera on each object (for Voyager), and we don't have to do that. It does it on its own, now."

Matson said that the science team estimates that Cassini will beam about 2.5 terabits of data back to Earth over the four year mission. In comparison, Voyager 1 and 2 sent back about 250 gigabits of data from Saturn combined.

"On the other hand, said Matson, "Voyager was first. It provided discovery information. Not all bits are the same. The first time you see that data, it is very exciting."

Beside, said Matson, "Going on Cassini is based on the first trip. We may find that those first assumptions may have been wrong, and that's what makes this even more exciting."