FAIRMONT, W.Va. – On Friday, September 15, 2017, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft will end its 13-year tour of the Saturn system with an intentional plunge into the planet to ensure Saturn’s moons remain untouched for future exploration. This dive is the final in a series of 22 weekly dives that began back in late April of this year. No spacecraft has ever ventured so close to the planet before.
Cassini began its journey to the ringed planet in 1997, as a way to provide important data to planetary scientists about one of Saturn’s mysterious moons, Titan. Touring the planet since 2004, the findings of this mission have revolutionized scientists’ understanding of the planet, its complex rings, the assortment of moons and the planet’s magnetic environment. In particular, these findings have fundamentally altered many of the concepts of how planets form around stars. Cassini has observed almost half of a Saturn year, which is 29 Earth years long.
While NASA’s Independent Verification & Validation (IV&V) Program did perform some work for this mission, one particular employee had the unique opportunity to send something up with the spacecraft. Senior systems engineer Shirley Savarino worked with the solid state recorder for the mission, which featured the ability to perform simultaneous data storage and access with no loss in processing capability. At the time, this was state of the art technology. As a gift for the recent birth of her daughter, a project coworker provided Savarino the opportunity to send a copy of a very special document to be placed onboard the Cassini spacecraft.
“When a spacecraft went up at that time, Jet Propulsion Laboratory would have a wall where people could post items of interest. They would then take a picture of the wall, convert [it] to a small microfiche chip, and tuck it into the spacecraft,” Savarino said. “So a copy of [our] daughter Kimberly’s birth certificate is on the Cassini spacecraft.”
Because Saturn is so far from Earth, Cassini will have been gone for about 83 minutes by the time its final signal reaches the Deep Space Network’s Canberra station in Australia on Sept. 15, 2017. The current predicted time for loss of signal on Earth is 4:55 a.m. PDT (7:55 a.m. EDT) on Sept. 15, 2017. This time may change as Saturn’s atmosphere slows Cassini during each of the final orbits.
For more information about NASA’s Cassini mission, please visit: https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/the-journey/
For a full list of the missions NASA’s IV&V Program has worked on, please visit: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/ivv/services/ivvprojects_current.html
If you’d like more information about this topic, or to schedule an interview, please call Jeff Northey at 304-367-8250 (work) or send an email to Jeffrey.R.Northey@nasa.gov.