“ The end of the Cassini probe at Saturn ”.
It was 8:55 a.m. on September 15, 2017 in Chile when NASA's Cassini satellite sent its last data from Saturn to the control mission on Earth. At a speed of 122,000 kilometers per hour, the ship - which left our planet from Cape Canaveral in 1997 - was diving into the atmosphere of the celestial body, around which it spent a total of 13 years orbiting, researching and performing experiments that changed our knowledge of the Solar System.
The grand finale
The final phase of the first mission to reach Saturn produced unprecedented observations of the planet and its rings, closer than ever before. As it plunged into the gas giant, the spacecraft continued to send back scientific data via telemetry until its thrusters could no longer keep the spacecraft's antenna pointed toward Earth.
The massive collection of data collected by Cassini totals 635 GB (gigabytes) with more than 450,000 images, and will continue to yield new discoveries for decades, related to the planet's formation and evolution, the processes occurring in its atmosphere, its rings and its potentially habitable moons.












