Farewell to the Cassini Probe, America ’s Emissary to Saturn

NASA flight planners have a long history of murdering their favorite space probes. They plan the ships, they build the ships — and at some point they wind up killing the ships. The Ranger probes — the first NASA spacecraft to touch the moon—were crash-landers. They were designed for one job: to fly straight toward the lunar face, switch on their cameras in the final 14 minutes of their journey, when they were just 1,500 miles from the surface, and then capture as many pictures as they could before vaporizing themselves in a violent, fireless crash on the moon’s airless surface. The Messenger probe, which circled Mercury for four years from 2011 to 2015, met a similarly nasty end, sent to a deliberate crash landing when it was almost out of fuel so it could collect the most close-up data possible before it became a drifting piece of space junk. On Sept. 15, at 7:55 AM EDT, the Cassini Saturn probe will follow its sisters into history, plunging to its end in Saturn’s atmosphere. But in this case, the death of the ship might actually save lives — Saturnian lives. Long before Cassini left Earth on October 15, 1997, astronomers knew that Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, was probably rich in liquid methane and ethane — hydrocarbons essential for life as we know it. Cassini confirmed that. The spacecraft also discovered that Enceladus, a smaller, ice-covered moon, emits periodic water geysers from its south pole. That almost certainly me...
Source: TIME.com: Top Science and Health Stories - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized cassini messenger NASA Ranger saturn space space 2017 Source Type: news