In Eight Days the space craft Cassini-Huygens: Exploring Saturn's System will

[turbinetree]

be sent into planet

https://www.space.com/38010-cassini-spacecraft-saturn-grand-finale.html

https://www.space.com/17754-cassini-huygens.html

[LanternWaste]

1. It did it's job, and I shouldn't be sad about an inanimate object

It did it's job, and I shouldn't be sad about an inanimate object, but I'll be a little weepy around my place next week when we get together for the final watch party.

[TeapotInATempest]

2. That's how I feel about the Mars rovers

So I feel ya.

[longship]

3. Carolyn Porco explains the mission. TED Talk.

Yup, this is a few years old, but it lays down what the mission was all about.

Plus, it's Carolyn Porco!!! She's the scientist who, when the New York Times asked her why she's never been married, answered "I have no high maintenance items in my home. No pets. No plants. No husbands."

One cannot help but love her madly.

Here's her brief TED follow-up on Enceladus:

[turbinetree]

5. Wado-------------Thank you

Forgot all about this......................until now thanks for the refresher

[Jarqui]

4. In June 2004, Cassini arrived at Saturn's system

That same month, my father was given his death sentence from a return of a nastier lymphoma.
He just loved space, NASA, exploration, theories of how the universe evolved, etc.

In the last few weeks of his life in Aug 2004, the family converged at a resort in cottage country. They had internet access (not a given at the time) and he was able to see the Cassini pics along with the Mars rover pics.

13 years later, the Cassini mission has been one of their greatest missions.

I'll always be indebted to NASA, etc for giving my father those final thrills (and many before them) - letting him kind of visit those planets before his final voyage off this planet in Sept 2004.

It's a little emotional to see it end - crazy - emotional over a machine (of course, there are great people behind it ..)

[hunter]

6. It becomes part of Saturn forever.

Remember it.

The only sadness will be if humanity forgets.

[enough]

7. Thanks for the heads up. NT

[turbinetree]

8. Your Welcome

[Warren DeMontague]

9. It has performed exceptionally well.. and returned- along with incredible science- some of the best

photographs taken in all of human history.



I've said it before, but I'll repeat myself: I'm fine with taking down statues of Columbus given what he did. We should be building statues of our new explorers anyway, people like Neil Armstrong.

And we can add this robot to that list, too.

[dumbcat]

10. That's kinda sad

Cassini has been a workhorse. I was fortunate enough to get a private, 2 hour tour of the Cassini Control Room at JPL in 2005 or 2006 (I forget exactly which year.) (Long story short - I was visiting JPL on another unrelated project when I happened to sit next to the Cassini Program Manager in the Cafeteria one lunchtime. Turns out he was a fellow amateur radio operator and we got to talking about spacecraft communications, and he said, "Hey, I'm the PM for the Cassini control room and commo suite, would you like a tour of the place?" Well, duh, YES.) So I got a private tour of the control room and got read in on the whole communications suite, which was pretty overwelming, even to me, and I have been working in that field my whole life.

I'll be watching the NASA channels and the "death dive" with some sadness.

[marybourg]

12. Cool story and lucky meet up. nt.

[StevieM]

11. I think our best bet for extra-terrestrial life in the solar system is Saturn's moon Enceladus.

There is also a chance that there is life on Titan, another moon of Saturn. But that life might be based on methane, not water, if it is even possible to have methane-based life.

[muriel_volestrangler]

13. And still producing new data: Cassini hints at young age for Saturn's rings

The spectacular rings of Saturn may be relatively young, perhaps just 100 million years or so old.

This is the early interpretation of data gathered by the Cassini spacecraft on its final orbits of the giant world.
...
This includes making a detailed map of the gravity field in which the contributions from the huge world and the rings can be teased apart.
...
The more massive they are, the older they are likely to be. Some scientists think they could even have formed with Saturn itself 4.6 billion years ago. They would certainly need a large mass to withstand the forces that might erode them over time, such as collisions from tiny meteoroids. But it is looking like the opposite may actually be true - that their mass is less than previously estimated.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-41091333