Cassini
Cassini–Huygens was a spacecraft launched by NASA in 1997, built to explore Saturn and its moons. After traveling millions of miles, Cassini finally reached the Saturn system in 2004. There, it orbited the planet for 13 years, a journey that included visits to Venus and Saturn’s moons Enceladus and Titan. It was responsible for a long list of groundbreaking discoveries, but its time was limited. The engineers at NASA sent Cassini on one final mission, an operation dubbed “The Grand Finale.” NASA directed it to crash into Saturn in order to avoid potentially contaminating the planet’s moons, which may contain extraterrestrial life. On September 15, 2017, Cassini’s mission ended as it burned up Saturn’s atmosphere, culminating its nearly two decades of service with a fiery death.
