Cassini Dives Into Saturn

 

- Shreeshan Venkatesh

ON SEPTEMBER 15 this year, the Cassini probe, beamed its final images back to earth from over a billion kilometres away. NASA scientists arranged for a fittingly poetic end to the Saturn mission as the probe dove into the object of its occupation for over two decades. Plunging down at a speed close to 125,000 km/hr, the spacecraft burned up and became one with the big planet.

Almost 20 years ago on October 15, 1997, scientists from NASA, ESA and the Italian Space Agency, together embarked on a mission to study Saturn, the farthest planet visible to the naked eye in our solar system. It was the farthest humans had ever inserted a probe into the solar system. Until then, scientists had only managed glimpses captured by NASA’s Voyager spacecrafts on their way to the outer solar system. The Cassini mission, named after the 17th century Italian astronomer Giovanni Cassini who had discovered the divisions in Saturn’s rings and four of its moons, was planned to orbit Saturn and study in close detail its rings and the condition of its many moons. To give you an idea of how much has changed in our understanding of the planet in the last two decades consider this—when Cassini was launched, fewer than 20 of the 62 currently known moons of Saturn had been discovered.