Tag Archives: Saturn

Cassini dies tomorrow

Well…just wanted to do a short one on the end of an era for exploration of the Saturn system and for us as humans….tomorrow morning, the Cassini probe will dive into the clouds of Saturn on it’s last act in a decade long run of exploration and discovery….before Cassini, we really didn’t know anything about Saturn other than from the few fleeting pictures take by the flyby Explorer and Voyager probes…but Cassini opened our eyes to the wonder of this mini solar system…the complexity of the rings, the 62 moons and the possibility of life were all discovered by this wonderful piece of human imagination….and I will be a little sad that it is gone…one of the highlights of the past decade for me was the surprise of new findings and new jaw-dropping photos that were regularly delivered to our computers…one of my favorite photos was done by accident…when Cassini was taking a photo from under the rings and, by accident, a pale blue dot showed up and one of the scientists on the project recognized that it had captured the earth from a billion miles away….and the vastness of space was brought home to me….so, goodbye Cassini…..and thanks to the hundreds of scientists that worked for so long to make the mission a success….