Cassini Spacecraft Prepares To End Mission With Dive Into Saturn’s Atmosphere + V/CLIP;

After 13 years in space, the spacecraft will be destroyed by the very planet it observed so closely.

The U.S. space agency’s Cassini spacecraft will end its 13-year mission to Saturn in mid-September by transmitting data until the final moment before it plunges into the ringed planet’s atmosphere, officials said on Tuesday.

Cassini, the first spacecraft to orbit Saturn, will make the last of 22 farewell dives between the planet’s rings and surface on September 15. The spacecraft will then burn up as it heads straight into the gas giant’s crushing atmosphere.

Cassini’s final dive will end a mission that provided groundbreaking discoveries that included seasonal changes on Saturn, the moon Titan’s resemblance to a primordial Earth, and a global ocean on the moon Enceladus with ice plumes spouting from its surface.

“The mission has been insanely, wildly, beautifully successful, and it’s coming to an end in about two weeks,” Curt Niebur, Cassini program scientist, said on a telephone conference call with reporters from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

Cassini’s final photo as it heads into Saturn’s atmosphere will likely be of propellers, or gaps in the rings caused by moonlets, said project scientist Linda Spilker.

The spacecraft will provide near real-time data on the atmosphere until it loses contact with Earth at 9.45pm AEST (1154 GMT) on September 15, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said.

Source: Cassini Spacecraft Prepares To End Mission With Dive Into Saturn’s Atmosphere