And the winner is…Cassini-Huygens, in triple overtime.
The spaceship conceived in 1982 and launched fifteen years later, will crash into Saturn on September 15, after a mission of 19 years and 355 days, powered by the audacity and technical prowess of scientists and engineers from 17 different countries, and 72 pounds of plutonium.
The mission was so successful that it was extended three times; it was intended to last only until 2008.
Since April, the ship has been continuing to orbit Saturn, swinging through the 1,500-mile gap between the planet and its rings, an area not previously explored. This is a good maneuver for a spaceship nearing the end of its mission, since colliding with a rock could end things early.
Cassini will dive a little deeper and plunge toward Saturn’s surface, where it will transmit data until it burns up in the planet’s atmosphere. The radio signal will arrive here early Friday morning, Eastern time. A NASA video explains.
In the years since Cassini has launched, space nuclear power has advanced. NASA is now working on a reactor that would power a base on Mars.
The spaceship conceived in 1982 and launched fifteen years later, will crash into Saturn on September 15, after a mission of 19 years and 355 days, powered by the audacity and technical prowess of scientists and engineers from 17 different countries, and 72 pounds of plutonium.
The mission was so successful that it was extended three times; it was intended to last only until 2008.
Since April, the ship has been continuing to orbit Saturn, swinging through the 1,500-mile gap between the planet and its rings, an area not previously explored. This is a good maneuver for a spaceship nearing the end of its mission, since colliding with a rock could end things early.
Cassini will dive a little deeper and plunge toward Saturn’s surface, where it will transmit data until it burns up in the planet’s atmosphere. The radio signal will arrive here early Friday morning, Eastern time. A NASA video explains.
In the years since Cassini has launched, space nuclear power has advanced. NASA is now working on a reactor that would power a base on Mars.
The dramatic end is deliberate; it will eliminate the
possibility that the probe could crash on a planet that could support any form
of life that stowed away on the spacecraft.
Cassini took seven years to get to Saturn, and then
transmitted dramatic pictures of the rings. It confirmed an ocean of water on
the moon Enceladus, raising the possibility of life there. It found new rings. Its
findings advanced our understanding about the origin of the rings and the
nature of the planet.
And it carried the Huygens probe, which was the first
man-made object to land on a world in the outer solar system. Huygens landed on
the surface of Titan on December 25, 2004.
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| Cassini above the rings of Saturn. |
Nuclear power made it possible. Cassini carries 72.3 pounds of plutonium-238, in a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG). When it was launched on its billion-mile trip, the plutonium put out enough heat to be converted into 878 watts of electricity – about two-thirds of what a hair dryer draws, but sufficient to run the instruments and radios. Twenty years later, it is still putting out about 600 watts, but mission controllers are ending the flight because spacecraft is running out of the chemical propellants used to adjust its orbit, mono-methyl hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide.
Plutonium-238 was originally produced as a by-product of creating plutonium-239 for nuclear weapons. After the United States stopped making new weapons fuel, it bought some plutonium-238 from Russia. There are several efforts now for making supplies for future space probes.
Sunlight on Saturn is only about 1/80th as strong
as on earth, so solar panels are not helpful. Mars is the approximate limit of
useful sunlight; some of the rovers on Mars used photo-voltaic panels, but Curiosity
used a radio-thermal generator like the one on Cassini. The New Horizons probethat visited Pluto in the summer of 2015 used a similar generator. That
generator is still running, as the probe prepares to visit an object in the
Kuiper Belt on January 1, 2019.
After Cassini goes, the stunning photos will still be here.
The above is from Matt Wald, senior communications advisor at NEI. Follow Matt on Twitter at @MattLWald.
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