Cassini has final flyby near Saturn’s Titan and begins its orbits around the ringed planet
The Cassini spacecraft recently had its last encounter with Saturn’s moon Titan and entered ints final set of 22 orbits around the ringed planet. In September, the spacecraft will plunge into Saturn.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Caltech division that manages the mission, announced the Cassini spacecraft made its 127th and final close approach to Titan on April 21 at 11:08 p.m. PDT (2:08 a.m. EDT on April 22), passing at an altitude of about 608 miles (979 kilometers) above the moon‘s surface.
According to JPL, Cassini transmitted its images and other data to Earth following the encounter. Scientists with Cassini’s radar investigation will be looking this week at their final set of new radar images of the hydrocarbon seas and lakes that spread across Titan’s north polar region. The planned imaging coverage includes a region previously seen by Cassini’s imaging cameras, but not by radar.
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The radar team also plans to use the new data to probe the depths and compositions of some of Titan’s small lakes for the first (and last) time, and look for further evidence of the evolving feature researchers have dubbed the “magic island.”
“Cassini’s up-close exploration of Titan is now behind us, but the rich volume of data the spacecraft has collected will fuel scientific study for decades to come,” Linda Spilker, the mission’s project scientist at NASA’s JPL, said.
The Cassini spacecraft was launched close to twenty years ago, in October 1997, and it entered Saturn’s orbit in 2004. Since then, Cassini has made numerous discoveries, including a global ocean that showed indications of hydro-thermal activity within the icy moon Enceladus, and liquid methane seas on its moon Titan.
As it’s running low on fuel, NASA decided, in 2010, to end the mission with a purposeful plunge into Saturn in order to protect and preserve the planet’s moons – especially the potentially habitable Enceladus – for future exploration.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency.
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