Cassini Spacecraft’s Stunning Mission to End With Fiery Saturn Descent

NASA can’t see the probe destroyed from 932 million miles away, since no other spacecraft exist at Saturn.

Nasa referred to this manoeuvre as a “goodbye kiss”, as it will melt into Saturn’s atmosphere on 15 September.

“We’ll be saddened, there’s no doubt about it, at the loss of such an incredible machine”, Cassini program manager Earl Maize said Wednesday during a news briefing at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

The team hopes to receive a signal for as long as possible while the satellite plummets into the giant world. This is another reason the mission scientists decided on Cassini’s particular end-game.

“It’s essentially now a real-time instrument”, Maize said. Although its mission was meant to end in 2008, because all of Cassini’s instruments were functional, NASA extended the mission.

By 3:30 a.m., Cassini will be gone.

The probe was scheduled to come back into contact with Earth the following day, on September 12, at around 06:19 p.m. PDT or 09:19 p.m. EDT.

The 20-year mission to get up close and personal with Saturn and its moons will end when the 22-foot robot burns up in the ringed planet’s cloud tops.

With low fuel, there is no way to abort the final maneuver.

The fourth space probe to visit the solar system’s second-largest planet (preceded by Voyager 1, Voyager 2 and Pioneer 11), Cassini is the first to orbit the gaseous giant. Enceladus has oceans beneath its ice and the presence of some of the necessary elements for life.

An infrared view of Saturn’s moon, Titan, as seen by the Cassini spacecraft. It’s logged 4.9 billion miles, sent back almost half a million images of the ringed planet and its moons, and transmitted 635 gigabytes worth of scientific data so far.

But they haven’t. “As much as I want to have a rational reaction”, says Jonathan Lunine, a planetary scientist at Cornell University, “it’s still really hard to say ‘This is it for Cassini, ‘ that we won’t be getting any more data from it after Friday, ever”.

If Cassini has done such a great job, why has NASA chose to crash the spacecraft into Saturn?

NASA’s Deep Space Network complex in Canberra, Australia will receive the last transmissions, barring a torrential rainfall in the region.

“Liquid water brings the possibility of life”, said Hammergren.

“The discovery of Enceladus’ plumes was my launchpad onto the mission, because the imaging team had no one assigned to design and acquire images of those spectacular plumes”, Verbiscer said. “And we’ve left the world informed, but still wondering”. Spilker recalled that when she began working on Cassini, “I gave most of my presentation using an overhead projector and viewgraphs”. “We’ve got to go back, I know it”. Some offices have already emptied as staff found posts on NASA’s Juno mission around Jupiter, the agency’s Mars 2020 rover or the Europa clipper, which aims to find out whether the Jovian moon is habitable. Although the Huygens mission met planetary-protection requirements back in 2005, when it landed on Titan, scientists’ new information about that moon’s potential habitability has made researchers keen to protect it from further exposure, Cassini research scientists have said. Scientists were concerned that it could soon prove impossible to control, and there was a remote chance of it colliding with Titan or Enceladus – both worlds that conceivably could host life.