16 September, 2017
NASA's Cassini space probe ended its 20-year mission on Friday by crashing into the surface of Saturn.
Cassini's final contact with Earth came at 7:55 a.m. EDT (1155 GMT).
"No doubt scientists will be analyzing the information from its final, one-way trip into Saturn's atmosphere for years to come", Owens said. The radio waves went flat, and the spacecraft fell silent.
"There are worldwide treaties that require that we can't just leave a derelict spacecraft in orbit around a planet like Saturn, which has prebiotic moons", said Maize. It was over in a minute or two.
"The spacecraft is gone", said Cassini program manager Earl Maize of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "I'm going to call this the end of mission". All the controllers of the flight shook hands, and they were in matching shirts, Bloomberg reported.
Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist, said saying farewell to the spaceship felt like "losing a friend".
All the present and past team members of the spacecraft attended the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California, for celebration and vigil. Even more congregated at nearby California Institute of Technology, which runs the lab for NASA.
It disintegrated into fragments and burned up in seconds as it plummeted at 77,000mph.
"There are times in this world when things just line up, when everything is just about flawless". It was the only NASA's project which survived and circled the planet.
It took seven years to reach Saturn after launching from Cape Canaveral in Florida in 1997 and the original intention was for it to explore the planet and its moons for just three years. Twenty-two times, Cassini entered the gap and came out again.
NASA made a decision to consciously destroy Cassini in order to prevent contamination of Saturn's moons, some of which are thought to perhaps contain conditions hospitable to life. In 2005, it dropped the probe Huygens onto Saturn's satellite Titan, the first time a craft executed a landing in the outer solar system. NASA's revolutionary Cassini spacecraft astonishingly discovered the presence of liquid water as well as active Chemistry on Titan and Enceladus thus hinting towards the possibility of life on those moons. It collected more than four hundred thousandimages and covered 4.9 billion miles in its lifetime. The final price tag was $3.9 billion.
Because of Cassini, astronomers have a much better understanding of Titan and Enceladus, another of Saturn's moons.
The latest count is 62 moons, six of them found by the spacecraft Cassini.
Titan's gravity nudged it onto a course back to Saturn, something the scientists involved in the mission nicknamed the goodbye kiss. Proposals are under consideration by NASA, but there's nothing official yet. By 2020s, NASA is planning to send a lander and an orbiter to Jupiter's moon Europa, because they believe that there can be an ocean and chances of life.
