After a 20 year long mission in space, Cassini, NASA’s spacecraft disintegrated in the sky above Saturn on September 15.
At 5:25 P.M., it was confirmed the spacecraft Cassini went out in cosmic glory after providing valuable information about Saturn and its moons.
Cassini burned up 83 minutes earlier like a meteor and plunged into Saturn’s atmosphere becoming one with the planet it monitored for years. It took 83 minutes for the news to reach our planet which is a billion miles away.
Program Manager Earl Maize gave the final announcement, “This has been an incredible mission, an incredible spacecraft and you’re all an incredible team. I’ll call this the end of the mission.”
Nearly 1,500 people, some past members of the Cassini team gathered at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California to celebrate the end of the spacecraft’s journey.
NASA called this death plunge as the Grand Finale as Cassini’s fuel tank was getting low after all these years. The scientists did not want Cassini to crash into Saturn’s moons, Enceladus or Titan and decided the death plunge to avoid harm to the moons.
Cassini succeeded in jumping through the rings of Saturn sending information of the unexplored gaps back to earth.
Cassini launched off Earth in 1997 and reached the second largest planet by the year 2004. In total, the brilliant spacecraft collected more than 453,000 images as it traveled 4.9 billion miles. Cassini is the only spacecraft to travel this far away from Earth.
