Cassini: Farewell to Saturn

[editor]

Three mins to go

 

[2hats]

LOS* in X and S band. End of mission at an altitude of just under 1400km and travelling at just over 124,000km/h.

* Loss Of Signal

e2a: notable X went first then S. X requires finer pointing (has higher data rate, tighter beam) than S (lower rate, wider beam).

 

[editor]

It's over. Lots of handshakes and hugs going on at mission control.

 

[petee]

 

[2hats]

No.

It did exactly what it was designed to do, more than it was originally designed to do. You can’t really ask for a better success rate/science return from an interplanetary mission.

 

[EastEnder]

 

[editor]

Cassini's last image in monochrome and natural-colour views.

 

[bimble]

i love this.

from here

 

[twentythreedom]

Great prog about Cassini on BBC2 now

 

[TheHoodedClaw]

Great prog about Cassini on BBC2 now

Yes, really good. A proper tribute to the craft itself and the people who devoted decades to the program.

 

[shifting gears]

Great prog about Cassini on BBC2 now

Was a superb bit of tv - stunning imagery, history of the mission, loads of the major players - it even had something of a tearjerker ending!

(show was Horizon, for anyone searching on iplayer)

 

[editor]

That was a fantastic documentary. Great to see so many women involved in the project too.

 

[alfajobrob]

It's breathtakingly beautiful..The chief scientist made me want to cry when she was talking about designing it and sitting inside..I LOVE people like that.

Lol I should called her the chief engineer instead of scientist..she would be pissed at that distinction!

She reminds me of one of the first and only managers I have ever respected..I would go into the wall for someone who could inspire me like that again.

 

[editor]

It won an Emmy!

 

[editor]

The last pic:

Just four days before the Cassini spacecraft's dramatic dive into Saturn's atmosphere last year, cameras aboard the spacecraft captured the mission's last image of Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

That image shows off what makes that moon so weird: It's covered in lakes brimming with methane and ethane. "Titan is a fascinating place that really teases us with some of its mysteries," Elizabeth Turtle, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, said in a NASA statement released with the image. [See Cassini's Amazing Titan Photos from Saturn]

 

[Baronage-Phase]

Great prog about Cassini on BBC2 now

Anyone know if this is online somewhere?

 

[mauvais]

Anyone know if this is online somewhere?

It's this isn't it?

 

[Baronage-Phase]

It's this isn't it?

...great thanks

 

[Baronage-Phase]

It's this isn't it?

That was spectacular.
Thanks again.

 

[Baronage-Phase]

I've fallen in love with the photo described in the programme.
"The Day The Earth Smiled".


I love it so much that I'm going to see if I can get a poster of it somewhere and frame it.

 

[editor]

Forget purple rain - Saturn has organic rain!

One new discovery was prompted by instrument results so strange that scientists on the team and beyond it at first thought there had to be a mistake. That instrument, called the Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer, or INMS, can sniff out the chemical composition of material it catches.

Scientists are particularly excited to see these results because word had gotten out that the instrument was onto something. "Since the end of the mission, there's been a lot of talk about these INMS results," Bonnie Meinke, a Saturn scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, who was not involved in any of the new research, told Space.com. "At first glance, it's the kind of thing that you almost don't believe, and as a scientist, you have to do a little gut check," Meinke said.

The instrument had a good track record, having gathered critical data earlier in the mission while Cassini explored moons like Titan and Enceladus. "Then we really got to focus in on Saturn and let it be the star for that final part of the mission," Rebecca Perryman, the operations lead for INMS at the Southwest Research Institute, told Space.com. "We'd done a lot of work to get everything planned initially and had really boasted that INMS would be able to get some fantastic results once we started dipping down into the atmosphere." [In Photos: Cassini Mission Ends with Epic Dive into Saturn]

They had expected those results to be measurements of the masses of "ring rain," which scientists knew as a trickle of tiny particles falling from Saturn's innermost ring down toward the planet's upper atmosphere — some hydrogen and helium mostly — nothing fancy.

But what they seem to have found was far more material than they had expected, coming from far more exotic compounds. The instrument spotted not just hydrogen and helium but also carbon monoxide, methane, nitrogen and the unidentifiable remains of organic molecules.

Other instruments suggested that this downpour also included water ice and silicate particles and showed that the downpour is triggered by the interaction of these particles with the highest levels of Saturn's atmosphere. Around the whole ring structure, it all adds up to somewhere around 10 tons (9,000 kilograms) per second.

Cassini's Death Dive into Saturn Reveals Weird Ring 'Rain' & Other Surprises

 

[editor]

Here's the boffin paper: Chemical interactions between Saturn’s atmosphere and its rings