Cassini's Saturn Mission Goes Out In A Blaze Of Glory (npr.org)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory sent a final command Friday morning to the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn. Not long after, accounting for the vast distance the message traveled, the order was received, putting the craft into a suicidal swan dive, plummeting into the ringed planet's atmosphere. Flight Director Julie Webster called "loss of signal" at about 7:55 a.m. ET, followed by Project Manager Earl Maize announcing "end of mission" as the spacecraft began to break up in Saturn's atmosphere. "Congratulations to you all," Maize announced to applause. "It's been an incredible mission, incredible spacecraft, and you're all an incredible team." With Cassini running on empty and no gas station for about a billion miles, NASA decided to go out Thelma & Louise-style. But rather than careen into a canyon, the plucky probe took a final plunge into the object of its obsession. Just how obsessed? Its 13-year mission to explore the strange world of Saturn went on nearly a decade longer than planned. It completed 293 orbits of the planet, snapped 400,000 photos, collected 600 gigabytes of data, discovered at least seven new moons, descending into the famed rings and sent its Huygens lander to a successful 2005 touchdown on the surface of yet another moon, Titan. Also read: Cassini's Best Discoveries of Saturn and Its Moons.

Comments

Contamination

[lazarus]

TFA states that plowing the craft into Saturn was necessary to prevent contamination of the moons, but the mission began with dropping a Huygens Lander on Titan.

Seems like nobody has make the distinction between bacterial contamination and radioactive contamination. I suspect that the latter is actually the concern as the probe used an RTG for power and thus it was safest to de-orbit it into Saturn.

RIP Cassini. Thanks for all the science.

Re:Life needs water (our kind of life, anyway)

[Tablizer]

dropped to a temperature of about 90K, barely above liquid nitrogen. No terrestrial life will contaminate anything at that temperature.

Not necessarily. Spores could survive in a frozen state, and then later if a liquid water volcano or similar erupts, the spores could awake and seep toward the core. Unlikely and/or many years away, but not impossible.