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Stellar Cassini Research Paper

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A Stellar Swan Song

Cassini is locked in a death dance with Saturn, yet it's revolutionizing our knowledge of not just the ringed planet, but moons like Titan, which, since the deployment of the Huygens lander, hints at what Earth may have been like very early in its primordial life.

The nuclear-powered spacecraft's four-year foray in Saturnian orbit began in 2004, and filled our screens with the majesty of Saturn's clouds and signature rings. It also studied the moons Enceladus, a frozen body striated with fractures and crevasses, and Titan, the planet-size hazy moon whose liquid methane rivers and sea astounded scientists. Enceladus' icy surface masks what many suspect to be a subsurface ocean, bustling with microbial life much the same as we suspect of Jupiter's moon Europa. …show more content…

As one of NASA's flagship missions (high-end explorations of the planets), the "Grand Finale" for the $3.26-billion, 20-year mission, will end in a spectacular display, disintegrating into Saturn's atmosphere.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrGAQCq9BMU

By discovering conditions for life on Saturn's moons, Cassini made its death dive a moral necessity for NASA. The irony of flagship missions like Cassini and Galileo is that their destruction is precisely because they exceeded our expectations.

Let's take a look at Cassini's last days:

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