Blog Week 8 - Cassini's last words

Cassini's last words

In the past week a great tool of space science shared it's final contributions with earth before plummeting to it's demise. The great tool in question was the Cassini spacecraft which had orbited Saturn since 2004 and had also delivered the Huygens probe to the surface of one of Saturn's moons, Titan. After thirteen years of relaying data and images of Saturn and it's moons the craft took a few lower altitude orbits before finally crashing itself into Saturn itself. The decision to destroy the craft was to protect many of the planet's many moon environments (thought to possibly be habitable) from biological contamination.

In the beginning
Work on the Cassini mission began in 1982 with the European Science Foundation (ESA) and the American National Academy of Sciences looking at possible collaborative efforts which eventuated in a NASA and ESA shared mission to send a probe (Huygens) to Titan and an orbiter craft (Cassini) to collect data and images of Saturn and it's moons. In 1997, after 15 years of design and planning, a Titan IV rocket launched the Cassini-Huygens mission into space for the beginning of a seven year journey to Saturn. On 1 July 2004 Cassini injected itself along with Huygens into orbit around Saturn and five and a half months later released the Huygens probe for it's decent to Titan, 22 years after the inception of the mission.

A picture speaks a thousand words
Over the next thirteen years Cassini would provide data and images of not just Saturn and it's rings but it's many moons also, and discovered seven previously undetected new moons on it's approach to the large planet. The mission did fly-bys of the moons Phoebe, Titan, Enceladus, Lapetus, Rhea, Hyperion, and Dione as well as flying through the planet's rings; data and images of each of these events were beamed back to earth for analysis. Cassini also sent home images of the Great White Spot storm of 2010 and a transit of Venus in front of the Sun. Initially the mission was slated to end in 2008 but was extended several times until it's time was up in September 2017.

What goes up must come down
On 29 November 2016 Cassini started it's second to last fly-by of Titan and thus began the start of it's maneuvering towards a collision with Saturn. The Titan fly-by on 22 April 2017 set it's orbit even lower almost sending the craft into Saturn's atmosphere and finally on 15 September sent it's last signals back to earth before colliding with the giant blue planet. $3.26 billion dollars, 35 years, two great space agencies, countless images and data samples later a great tool of space science can now rest easy having provided us with the ability to study Saturn and it's moons in such great detail.

Reference:
Howell, E. (2017) Cassini-Huygens: Exploring Saturn's System Retrieved from
    https://www.space.com/17754-cassini-huygens.html
Cassini–Huygens. (2017, September 23) In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.
    Retrieved September 23, 2017, from
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini-Huygens

Comments

  1. Zinettie ClarkSeptember 24, 2017 at 4:24 PM

    Hey Evan!
    I loved this blog, my personal favorite of yours.
    I never knew about his and enjoyed learning about it in your blog!
    It is amazing research they do up there, and the images they are able to retrieve!
    All the best for the following week =)

    ReplyDelete

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