Space exploration: Cassini bows out in a blaze of glory
Last Monday, the veteran Cassini spacecraft made its final flyby of Saturn’s moon, Titan, as its fuel supplies dwindled. For almost 13 years, the tiny flagship of space exploration zipped around the great, ringed planet and its moons, reaching speeds of 126,000km/h and sending data back 1.2-billion kilometres to Earth. On Friday, the craft had its final encounter with Saturn, plunging into the planet’s atmosphere, where it was vaporised within minutes in a meteoric blaze. "We’re a little frazzled," admits principal investigator of the Cassini Magnetometer, Prof Michele Dougherty, ahead of the suicide plunge. The University of Natal-educated South African scientist has helped to lead the mission since Cassini’s launch in 1997. She was awarded the 2008 Hughes Medal by the Royal Society of London — in recognition of an original discovery in the physical sciences — for this work. In a sense, Cassini and Dougherty, together with the other scientists on the project, formed a single explor...
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