Tomorrow morning marks the end of NASA’s super successful Cassini mission. It has been studying our ringed planet for over 13 years and has been in space for almost 20. Cassini has had numerous scientific discoveries, including observations from the Huygens probe which landed on Saturn’s Moon Titan.
NASA and JPL Mission scientists have been preparing for Cassini’s end since April when the spacecraft began its Grand Finale phase of highly elliptical orbits taking Cassini into the space between Saturn’s rings and its outer atmosphere.
Starting this afternoon (at 4:22 pm EDT), Cassini will be doing one final “data dump” of all the science is has stored but has yet to transmit back to Earth. Early tomorrow morning (at 3:15 EDT) Cassini will go into “Real Time Downlink” mode and begin transmitting data seconds after it records it. Then Cassini will begin entering Saturn’s atmosphere at 6:30 am EDT. At 6:32 EDT, NASA expects Cassini to lose contact with Earth. However, it will take an hour and a half for Cassini’s final transmission to reach us.
You can watch live coverage of Cassini’s end of mission on NASA TV beginning at 7 a.m. EDT on Friday, Sept. 15. You can also watch Cassini’s final images come in at Cassini Raw. Some other awesome NASA links about Cassini:
https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/the-journey/grand-finale-feature/
https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/grand-finale/overview/
https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/grand-finale/cassini-end-of-mission-timeline/
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/main/index.html
Cassini entered orbit around Saturn on June 30, 2004 when I was between my second and third year of graduate school. It’s hard to believe that 13 years have passed since then and I will miss Cassini. It has been an important tool in astronomy and astrophysics, providing endless data about our very unique ringed planet, its moons, and of course its rings.
So, I say farewell and many thanks to Cassini. And to Saturn, I hope we will be sending you a new visitor soon.
Clear Skies
~Misty Carty, Ph.D.