Posted September 16, 2017 20 years for Cassini A “goodbye kiss” set Cassini on its final, fatal course. Just after 3:30 a.m. California time on Friday, Cassini entered Saturn's atmosphere, plummeting at a pace of about 77,000 miles per hour. For a few minutes, the spacecraft's thrusters fought to keep its high-gain antenna pointed toward Earth, so it could continue to send back real-time data from this uncharted territory. 5 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted September 16, 2017 While the idea is ok if sending it into the atmosphere is ok if they get good science from it I wonder if they would get more good science if they left it in orbit. 0 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted September 16, 2017 As a science nerd, I love this stuff! They collected so much data and just scratched the surface. Great post Kaduk 0 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted September 16, 2017 Over half of Cassinis' 12,000 lb. weight was made up of fuel for it's main engine and thrusters. It also had plutonium on board to produce electricity, as solar panels are useless that far from the sun. After almost 20 years, it was running out of fuel. They chose to crash it into Saturn, where it would disintegrate, rather than have it contaminate one of the 60+ moons that orbit Saturn. NatGeo channel had an excellent 1 hour show the other night. Here's a good description of why it was crashed into Saturn. 3 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted September 16, 2017 25 minutes ago, Johnboy#1 said: It also had plutonium on board to produce electricity, as solar panels are useless that far from the sun. The plutonium was a bit of a concern. Anytime you launch a probe with plutonium, lots of concern should the rocket explode on launch. Cassini was an even bigger concern due to one of the slingshots it was using to get to Saturn would cause it to pass REAL close to Earth. Should the probe veer off course and smack into Earth's atmosphere (and burn up), pretty much the entire world's population would be exposed to plutonium. That was the bad news, but, calculations were that only (tell that to the poor souls) 5000-10000 extra cancer deaths. And odds of probe failing this way was 1 in 1,000,000. 0 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted September 17, 2017 The 3039 papers published are only the beginning. One of the amazing things found was the possibility of extra terrestrial life due to the chemical composition of 2 of Saturn's moons. 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites