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

[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.