Today is a sad day. In about two hours, the NASA space probe Cassini will be plummetting into the atmosphere of Saturn. It will keep transmitting the data from its instruments for as long as its thrusters, operating at full power, can keep its antenna pointed at Earth.

But the force of its descent will be too strong. It will lose lock. It will tumble. And then it will be gone.

It won't be sending pictures back on its way down - they would take too long to transmit. But over the thirteen years of its mission around Saturn, it has sent back literally tens of thousands of beautiful images of the planet, its rings, its family of moons, and - on one memorable day in 2013 - every single human being who has ever lived.

This is a sad day. In fact, it's a sharding miserable day, particularly for those of us who used the probes maps of Titan on our Gathering there. There's no other probe like it - of the four other probes beyond the Belt, the Voyagers are just looking at the stars, New Horizons can only make flybys, and Juno is locked into a close orbit around Jupiter, and seems to be ignoring the moons. Cassini is unique, and in a very short while, it will be gone.

... which is why I wrote/compiled a small tribute to it and its years of work.

Goodnight, Cassini

hS