Cassini Bids Farewell before Blazing into Saturn

Scientific American ------- What do you do when your spacecraft runs out of fuel after a 20-year journey? Send it barreling into the planet it has studied for more than a decade in a final blaze of glory, of course.The Cassini mission launched on October 15, 1997. Seven years later the spacecraft entered Saturn’s orbit. Since then it has made some incredible discoveries at the solar system’s second-largest world, including finding liquid hydrocarbon lakes on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, as well as spying plumes of water ice and particles jetting from a subsurface ocean within another moon, Enceladus. Now the spacecraft is nearing the end of its journey. Speaking from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) on Tuesday, a panel of Cassini scientists discussed the mission’s dramatic conclusion. To learn more click on the picture below to read the article.