On Friday morning, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena will watch their Cassini spacecraft take a suicide dive into Saturn’s atmosphere, thus ending two decades of spectacular exploration of the giant planet and its multiple moons.
Cassini is about to run out of fuel and, though it could continue sending data back to Earth, the folks at JPL would no longer be able to steer its course. The decision was made to destroy the spacecraft now to avoid any chance that it might crash into Titan or Enceladus and contaminate the potentially life-sustaining environments of either of those moons.
Those are magic words: life-sustaining. During its long trek around Saturn, Cassini discovered that Titan and Enceladus both contain elements that could allow life forms to develop and that habitability may not be out of the question. But don’t pack your bags for a trip to Saturn yet. Ours is not a Star Wars galaxy where humans can hit warp drive and zip between an array of planets that are all equally hospitable. In the non-fictional universe, the tiny blue speck called Earth is the only known environment where human beings can survive and thrive without the aid of complex technology.
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