USA TODAY International Edition
Cassini spacecraft’s fiery finale: A death dive inside Saturn’s rings
‘ We are going in, and we are not coming out’
The gap between Saturn and its innermost ring is unknown territory, potentially strewn with flying dust that could devastate anything in its path. Now the first spacecraft is about to venture into that unexplored realm.
Seasoned NASA probe Cassini will dive into the gap this month for an unparalleled research campaign nicknamed the Grand Finale. The name is not hyperbole: Once it has fulfilled its mission, Cassini will plunge into the heart of Saturn, ending 13 years of remarkable scientific discoveries.
“We are going in and we are not coming out,” Cassini project manager Earl Maize of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said at a briefing Tuesday.
After it punctures Saturn’s cloud tops, the spacecraft will survive perhaps three minutes until it succumbs to the intense heat and pressure. It will disintegrate, and its pieces will first melt and then vaporize, making Cassini “a part of the very planet it left Earth 20 years ago to explore,” Maize said. It took seven years for the spacecraft just to reach Saturn.
Even in its final minutes, the spacecraft will beam back data about the atmosphere’s composition. And the last five months of Cassini’s career, as it orbits Saturn 22 times, promise to be among the most fruitful in a mission that has astounded and delighted scientists.
On April 22, the craft will whip by Saturn’s biggest moon, Titan, an encounter that will nudge Cassini onto a path so audacious that planetary- science commentator Emily Lakdawalla once said it seemed “totally crazy.” Cassini will hop over Saturn’s rings, which form a gauzy collar of dust and ice around the giant planet, and thread the needle between Saturn’s atmosphere and the D ring, which begins only 1,200 miles from the planet itself.
The resulting information “might be the best of the mission,” Cassini project scientist Linda Spilker said.