"Linda Spilker, the lead scientist on Cassini, knew her team had to preserve the integrity of the potentially habitable moons. “We don’t want to go back to Enceladus and find there’s microbes that we put there,” she says. As a spacecraft runs out of fuel, as Cassini now has, each orbit increases the chance of losing control and impacting a moon. That’s why they need to be destroyed...
The death of Galileo taught the team a lot about planning the end of Cassini. Galileo was the first robotic probe to collide with a gas giant; Cassini will be the second. Cassini’s final marching orders outlined a grand finale of 22 orbits of Saturn. The final five would begin to skim the upper atmosphere, scooping the clouds with its instruments. These orbits would yield unprecedented scientific results. Spilker and her team had always wanted to fly through the planet’s rings, but it was too dangerous. Now was their chance to try something deadly...
Still, it’s extremely difficult for the team to let go of the spacecraft. Some members refer to the probes as their children. Many spend upward of 30 years on one mission. “It’s like in the death of a loved one—you look back and you think about all the good memories, the times you’ve shared together, went on vacation together, grandchildren,” says Spilker. “I think of it more like planning perhaps a wake.”
FB: "When humans die, they release a final breath. The ancient Egyptians called this last exhale a “wind” that arrives to carry away a person’s soul to the afterlife. For Cassini, the impact from falling backward through the hydrogen-thick atmosphere will tear away its parts—first the large sections, then the instruments, until the antenna pointing toward Earth sends back one final beep. This message will breeze past Jupiter and Mars, through the solar plasma pushing toward deep space, and finally run into Earth, where it will be collected in the antennas of the Deep Space Network."
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