The Cassini spacecraft just crashed into Saturn

The Cassini spacecraft just crashed into Saturn

PASADENA, Calif. — NASA scientists just received their last-ever message from the Cassini spacecraft, which plunged into Saturn early Friday morning. Those final bits of data signal the end of one of the most successful planetary science missions in history.

"The signal from the spacecraft is gone and within the next 45 seconds so will be the spacecraft," program manager Earl Maize reported from mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, just after 4:55 a.m. local time. "This has been an incredible mission, an an incredible spacecraft, and you're all an incredible team."

Cassini was the first human probe to orbit Saturn; launched in 1997 and inserted into orbit in 2004, it revolutionized our understanding of the ringed planet. The spacecraft revealed the structure of Saturn's rings and, by delivering the Huygens probe to the moon Titan, executed the first landing of a spacecraft in the outer solar system. It also exposed two moons —Titan, a land of methane lakes, and Enceladus, which has jets of water streaming from its southern pole — as prime targets in the search for life beyond Earth.

After 13 years in orbit, Cassini leaves researchers with still more mysteries to ponder: they don't know the length of the Saturn day or understand the quirks of its magnetic field. And it will fall to a future mission to discover whether one of Saturn's potentially-habitable moons could truly be home to alien life.

So the Cassini finally ends it's 20 year mission by crashing into Saturn. It taught us much about the planet and its surrounding moons, but there is still much to learn. I've always found Saturn to be one of the most fascinating planets in our Solar System with its distinct and enormous rings, and this mission taught us so much. The two moons that could support life are great developments in itself.

some speculate that Cassini carried a neutron bomb to turn Saturn into a star.
The progress will eradicate all surface dwellers of earth, and make a new start for the rich in their bunkers.
is it more bright outside today then normal, or is it just me.

Anyway.. I hope they will share pictures of the final descent.

a reply to: Krazysh0t

And the guy said his wife was driving, she was of course at home while he had mysteriously gotten into the passenger seat and stank to high heaven of booze.


Oh you mean the probe, Sorry I just could not resist.

I do wonder though how much data they can actually get from this death dive, actually probably quite a bit but it would have been better if they had a two stage probe, one to stay in orbit long term and the other to perform this death dive to sample as much of the atmosphere as it could on it's way down.

I wonder if it burned up first or was crushed by the intense pressure, most likely burned up long before it got deep enough which is a shame because imagine the data they could have gained if it had been tough enough to survive to those depth's, then again transmitting data through the dense atmosphere and likely natural radio interference would not have been easy, a second orbiter to monitor the death dive though could in theory at least have also provided data such as spectral analysis as the craft burned up and given the known property's of the craft and it's material composition this could have then been used to provide further spectral analytic data on the make up of the planets upper atmosphere (at least in theory but it would be a hard target to track optically and perhaps even have been impossible as it passed from view into the deeper atmosphere depending on how much energy was converted into plasma by it's entry into the planets atmosphere.

Cool post thank's for sharing.

originally posted by: Krazysh0t
The Cassini spacecraft just crashed into Saturn

Was my wife driving this thing? There goes the insurance again...

Looking forward to the images and data, I think this is one of NASA's best programs as we have learned a great deal from the mission and it has increased our knowledge in may areas of exo-planetary exploration.

a reply to: Spacespider

That is funnier than mine, a neutron bomb though how would that initiate fusion, it could probably initiate fission but I can't see it initiating fusion, then again the shock wave of a fission explosion would potentially have the pressure on it's leading edge to begin a small amount of fusion but not for very long and not sustainable.

Jupiter and Saturn are a little too small but there are probably red dwarf star's or brown dwarf's that are potentially smaller than Jupiter (but much denser so actually of greater mass) so not impossible.

Some even argue that as Jupiter actually generates it's own internal heat it may be regarded as almost brown dwarf, a very small one (not one of mine though they may be smaller but they can be bloody painful).

a reply to: Krazysh0t

Too bad Cassini was not able to prove Norman Bergrun's book, The Ringmakers of Saturn, to be true. Which posited that the rings themselves were being created by giant alien mining ships.

Why?

Because that would be cool.

Anyway, I can just imagine the data and images they were able to collect on it's trip down.

a reply to: introvert

They are thought to be a short lived phenomena and if so then there may have been time's in our solar systems past when Jupiter had ring's too and there may even come a time when either of these planet's does again.

We were just fortunate to exist in a age in the solar system when this phenomena actually occurred.

I always liked that idea giant about organic creatures making the ring's but never believed it, it sold book's though so?.

To my mind they are just what they are, likely a moon torn apart by tidal stress or even a collision between two moon's leaving there remain's as a delicate ring of particle's whose differential velocity's allowed them to form a flat disc like region around the planet, further out parts of the ring moving faster and the inner ring moving slower - also dictated by the relative size (mass) of the particles to there velocity, the line's formed by larger chunk's and area's of natural separation and attraction, gravitation and electrostatic between these particle's, they could even in time conglomerate into a new smaller body than they were once potentially formed from, still one of the most beautiful and awe inspiring phenomena in the solar system.

the real beauty of it though is the lack of parabolic orbit in these particles since most of them seem to orbit in a damn near perfect circle around the planet and that is almost like design.

The sheer number of coincidences in our solar system are astounding, perhaps even extremely improbable, a planet, our planet with a moon that is almost at the exact correct distance and in an almost perfectly circular orbit (just like those ring's) to seem to be the same size as our sun, a planet, our planet in the one place in the Goldilocks's zone to allow liquid water over most of the planet to exist while being cool enough to allow permanent ice cap's at the pole's and in an orbit that does not wander too much in that Goldilocks zone, on and on and on and perhaps the most mysterious not only life but a life form that ration's, reason's, look's and wonders about it all, we are a miracle in the cosmos and even if there are trillions of other sentient races that is no less true than if there was only us.

a reply to: LABTECH767

I like the theory that the rings were created during the Late Heavy Bombardment period, in which something collided with the planet that once existed between Mars and Jupiter, creating the asteroid belt, destroying Mars' surface/atmosphere and spraying debris towards Jupiter and Saturn...and creating the rings.

tonight, on saturn news what was that thing that crashed into our planet earlier today, some say alien technology we reveal all later, now the sports.

a reply to: introvert

That would be cool, but if that was the case most of the particles would surely have more of an elliptical orbit so I would guess myself and I am only a normal guy so no expert that it was probably a body or two already in orbit around the planet.

As for the asteroid belt I do believe it may once have been a planet, what we are seeing in the asteroid belt is likely only a tiny fraction of it's lost mass and there was a scientist and astronomer by the name of Tom Van Flandern now deceased whom believed very strongly that mars may have once been a satellite of this lost planet but another scientist whom work's at Nasa estimated even if it was a planet it would have been far smaller than mars - but how much of the lost bulk of an exploded planet flung off into parabolic orbit's and now not part of the asteroid belt did he even factor in?.


www.davidreneke.com...

There was a fantastic website called MetaResearch.org that seem's to have gone defunct but hosted Van Flandern's work and theory's, the guy was not a crackpot but now he is gone the theory has lost one of it's leading scientist's and proponent's.

a reply to: Krazysh0t

Enjoyed all of the released 🤔 Cassini-Huygens mission data. Thanks NASA for sharing what you could.
It would be interesting if there were more final images of its descent capturing the SATURN atmosphere.
Possibly more future missions with known and unknown probes. Where the pubic is made aware of one but more then one get launched? To retrieve further data...

originally posted by: introvert
a reply to: Krazysh0t

Too bad Cassini was not able to prove Norman Bergrun's book, The Ringmakers of Saturn, to be true. Which posited that the rings themselves were being created by giant alien mining ships.

Why?

Because that would be cool.

"absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"

Amazing

originally posted by: LABTECH767
a reply to: Krazysh0t
I wonder if it burned up first or was crushed by the intense pressure, most likely burned up long before it got deep enough which is a shame because imagine the data they could have gained if it had been tough enough to survive to those depth's, then again transmitting data through the dense atmosphere and likely natural radio interference would not have been easy, a second orbiter to monitor the death dive though could in theory at least have also provided data such as spectral analysis as the craft burned up and given the known property's of the craft and it's material composition this could have then been used to provide further spectral analytic data on the make up of the planets upper atmosphere (at least in theory but it would be a hard target to track optically and perhaps even have been impossible as it passed from view into the deeper atmosphere depending on how much energy was converted into plasma by it's entry into the planets atmosphere.

I was thinking some of the same thoughts. Get a good idea of what the internal makeup of the planet looks like during the craft's death dive.

a reply to: introvert

Heh. That would be cool, but it's not like you should have gotten your hopes up for that or anything. Though it would be nice to find that ONE piece of evidence that definitively proves alien existence once and for all. Planet tampering on a different planet than ours would do the trick sufficiently.

originally posted by: Krazysh0t
a reply to: introvert

Heh. That would be cool, but it's not like you should have gotten your hopes up for that or anything. Though it would be nice to find that ONE piece of evidence that definitively proves alien existence once and for all. Planet tampering on a different planet than ours would do the trick sufficiently.

Hey, we all have something we like to look forward to.

I know Bergrun's book was very far-fetched, but I thought it would be cool.

a reply to: introvert

It would be cool. No arguments here.

a reply to: introvert

It was a 2 part probe.

It dropped a probe called Huygen's onto Titan - first time we did that to a moon outside of Earth, got some pretty cool pictures and data from it.



RIP Cassini and Huygen.

Picture of Saturn this morning, taken with a telescope in Australia:

h.dropcanvas.com...

Before crashing, Cassini took a "goodbye" mosaic of whole Saturn and its rings, backlit by the Sun. The full image will be on the Internets soon, no doubt, but here's a little snippet meanwhile: