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Thirteen years after braking into orbit around Saturn, the end came at 6:32 a.m. EDT, one minute after the spacecraft plunged into the thin-but-discernible extreme upper atmosphere 1,190 miles above Saturn\u2019s cloud tops.<\/p>\n
Cassini\u2019s flight computer attempted to maintain the probe\u2019s orientation, firing its thrusters as buffeting built up to keep the spacecraft\u2019s big dish antenna pointed at Earth so it could transmit a final trove of data.<\/p>\n
But the thrusters were quickly overwhelmed, the spacecraft lost lock on Earth and began tumbling, according to pre-impact calculations, quickly heating up, breaking apart and melting to vapor, its constituents spreading out and merging with the atmosphere of the planet it spent its life exploring.<\/p>\n
Cassini\u2019s final bits of data, traveling at the speed of light \u2014 186,000 miles per second \u2014 took 83 minutes to cross the 932 million miles to Earth, reaching NASA\u2019s 230-foot-wide Deep Space Network antenna near Canberra, Australia, at 7:55:46 a.m.<\/p>\n
At that point, Cassini\u2019s telemetry stream suddenly stopped, confirmation Cassini had met its fiery fate as expected.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs you just heard, the signal from the spacecraft is gone and within the next 45 seconds, so will be the spacecraft,\u201d Earl Maize, the Cassini project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told the flight control team.<\/p>\n
\u201cI hope you\u2019re all deeply proud of this amazing accomplishment. Congratulations to you all. This has been an incredible mission, an incredible spacecraft and you\u2019re all an incredible team. I\u2019m going to call this the end of mission.<\/p>\n Then, for the last time, Maize said \u201cproject manager off the net,\u201d and took off his headset.<\/p>\n Flight controllers stood up from their computer displays, hugged and cheered along with more than 1,500 scientists, engineers, managers, friends and family members gathered at JPL to share Cassini\u2019s final moments.<\/p>\n \u201cI was just overwhelmed with how professional this team is,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, director of the science mission directorate at NASA Headquarters. \u201cDuring the entire time, this was clearly emotional for everybody. \u2026 But everybody was so professional to the very end. It went so fast! It\u2019s all about teamwork with this mission, and it showed in the last seconds.\u201d<\/p>\n Launched in October 1997, Cassini arrived at Saturn in July 2004, the first spacecraft to observe the ringed planet from orbit. The following January, Cassini dropped off a lander built by the European Space Agency that successfully completed a parachute descent to the surface of the large moon Titan, revealing an alien landscape beneath a thick, smog-like atmosphere.<\/p>\n Cassini\u2019s cloud-piercing radar imaging system eventually mapped the moon, revealing networks of methane rivers, lakes and seas.<\/p>\n \u201cTo put a probe onto Titan, capture a signal on the way down, land it softly on the surface and play those images back, I still give myself goosebumps just seeing that first image,\u201d Maize said earlier. \u201cI\u2019ll never forget it.\u201d<\/p>\n Cassini went on to orbit Saturn 294 times, repeatedly using Titan\u2019s gravity to alter its trajectory, setting up flybys of multiple moons and giving the spacecraft different perspectives on Saturn and its vast ring system as its seasons slowly changed.<\/p>\n Over the course of its 13-year mission, Cassini executed 2.5 million commands, carried out 360 engine burns, completed 162 targeted flybys of Saturn\u2019s moons, took more than 453,000 images and discovered six previously unknown moons, covering 4.9 billion miles since launch in 1997.<\/p>\n Most important, the spacecraft collected 635 gigabits of data resulting in nearly 4,000 peer-reviewed scientific papers.<\/p>\n \u201cNot only is this an incredible engineering and scientific achievement, it is a human achievement,\u201d Maize said earlier. \u201cThe engineering and science and navigation teams have just done a phenomenal job getting absolutely everything they possibly could out of this mission. The spacecraft has been used to its fullest.\u201d<\/p>\n The decision to crash Cassini into Saturn was made several years ago, the result of the spacecraft\u2019s own discoveries.<\/p>\n Saturn\u2019s moon Enceladus is now known to harbor a saltwater ocean beneath an icy crust, with hydrothermal vents on the seafloor and jets of water ice and vapor spewing into space from cracks in the crust near the south pole.<\/p>\n Cassini flew through the plumes and detected organic compounds, indicating the tiny moon could, in theory, harbor a habitable environment and, possibly, life beneath its relatively thin crust \u2014 an unexpected discovery that ranks among Cassini\u2019s major achievements.<\/p>\n Flight controllers knew Cassini would eventually run out of gas and would no longer be controllable. To eliminate any chance of an inadvertent collision that could contaminate Enceladus with Earthly debris and possible microbes, mission managers came up with a daring end-of-mission scenario.<\/p>\n Rather than use up Cassini\u2019s remaining propellant to boost it into a remote orbit, bringing close-range observations to an end, the spacecraft was directed to fly by Saturn\u2019s large moon Titan in April, using the moon\u2019s gravity to put it on a trajectory that repeatedly carried it between Saturn\u2019s cloud tops and its inner most rings.<\/p>\n The spacecraft made 22 such orbits before a final nudge by Titan earlier this week \u2014 the \u201cgoodbye kiss\u201d \u2014 that put Cassini on course for impact Friday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION Dutifully beaming back data to the very end, NASA\u2019s long-lived Cassini probe slammed into Saturn\u2019s atmosphere at some 77,000 mph Friday, blazing like a shooting star as it was ripped apart and incinerated in the final chapter of an enormously successful mission. Cassini program manager at JPL, Earl […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2394,1183,1561,1562],"class_list":["post-14337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-cassini","tag-jet-propulsion-laboratory","tag-planetary-science","tag-saturn"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14337"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14337"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14337\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/091517_LOS.jpg\")
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