One minute after the Cassini spacecraft plunges into Saturn’s atmosphere, it will die, but we won't know it until 83 minutes later.
NASA will declare Cassini dead at 7:55 a.m. ET Friday morning, however, the intrepid spacecraft would have actually tumbled through Saturn’s churning clouds and incinerated like a meteor more than an hour and a half before that.
The final signal NASA scientists receive from Cassini will be a ghostly cry from a long-gone spacecraft.
This is because, at closest, Saturn is some 750 million miles from Earth. NASA expects the final signal, shot out from Cassini’s antenna as it falls into Saturn’s depths, to reach Earth 83 minutes after that final event. Read more...
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