Cassini Saturn probe meets end
For the past twenty years, Saturn has had a visitor orbiting it. Nessini, the probe, has collected huge amounts of data about Saturn and its rings, but its primary function has been to study the moons of Saturn, and it has come back with some interesting news.
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Nessini’s mission has ended. On September 15, around 8 a.m., the spacecraft is being sent into Saturn’s atmosphere in a blaze of glory to study the composition of the planet more closely, but the scientists at NASA already know that the probe will not make it back. The question still stands, though, why now?
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This little spaceship that could has been in orbit around Saturn for about thirteen Earth years, which is just about half of a Saturn year. It takes Saturn about thirty Earth years to orbit the sun once. In that time it’s taken over 450,000 pictures with its camera, and found that two of Saturn’s moons, Titan and Enceladus, could potentially support life. Sure, it could support life, but certainly not Earth life. Earth life needs a sun, and the sun is almost exactly ten times as far away from the sun as our little blue planet is. The reason that this twenty year old ship is in the news now is because it might be able to support life.
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The probe has been out there longer than the person writing this article has been alive, and it’s beginning to get a little faulty. It isn’t exactly going to make a return trip--it simply wasn’t designed for that--but if they leave it out in space, there’s a chance that certain microbes could still be clinging to the ship. In the pursuit of keeping the moon clean, and seeing as much of Saturn as possible, scientists have decided to let its final mission destroy the craft.
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Nessini actually was finally crushed by Saturn’s gravity, somewhat in the same way that someone would be crushed if one went to the bottom of the ocean. Nessini was sent to go as deep as it could into Saturn’s atmosphere, using most of its data-collecting tools-before the pressure crushed it like a tin can under a boot.