Farewell little spacecraft

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has been vaporized. The probe dove into Saturn’s upper atmosphere this morning, and NASA lost the vehicle’s signal at 7:55AM ET, indicating it had broken apart irrevocably during its rapid descent toward the planet. Cassini’s demise officially puts an end to the probe’s 13-year mission at Saturn and wraps up a 20-year tour traveling through space.

It all went more or less like NASA had intended. The mission team behind Cassini has planned to send the spacecraft into Saturn for many years now, in order to protect the planetary system the vehicle has been exploring. Two of Saturn’s moons — Enceladus and Titan — are considered tantalizing places that could potentially host life, and NASA wants to continue studying these worlds in the future. But the agency didn’t want to risk Cassini accidentally crashing into one of these moons and spreading around Earth microbes. So the team decided to bring Cassini closer to Saturn than ever before to do some final science, before sending the probe into the planet to meet its fiery end.