Cassini

[Image 1: A mostly shadowed illustration of the planet Saturn's bottom left quarter and their rings from below. The Cassini probe flying past looking very small. The sun shines behind Saturn providing the light, peaking over the edge of Saturn’s horizon.}

The Cassini spacecraft was launched on 10/15/1997 at 4:43 AM EDT to study Saturn in what would become a 20 year collaboration between NASA and the European and Italian space agencies. It was the fourth of its kind to visit Saturn, but the first to enter into Saturn’s orbit. This one way trip took seven years to complete, leaving 13 more for Saturn-related data collection.

The probe’s final maneuver before running out of fuel, called the Grand Finale, daringly cut a path between Saturn and his rings, continuing to orbit until crashing into Saturn’s atmosphere. This provided an unprecedented view of the planet and prevented us from littering on Saturn’s potentially pre-biotic moons. Cassini followed this path, orbiting Saturn several times while collecting a metric fuck ton of data.

We received the last transmission on 9/15/2017 at 7:55 AM EDT (collecting data 30 seconds longer than predicted, like a true overachiever), and was expected to succumb to the atmosphere approximately 45 seconds later. It takes radio signal 83 minutes to travel from Saturn to here, so contact was likely lost in real time on Saturn at what was 6:32 AM EDT. From what I can understand, these times may be slightly off due to variables in atmospheric density and how that affects trajectory.

[Image 2: a bi-wheel event chart showing the Launch time in the center portion and the time of signal loss shown in the outer chart ring.]

September of 2017 places Saturn in tropical Sagittarius, in the last decan. Sagittarius symbolizes long distance travel, a thrilling mission, or striking out on an adventure. Austin Coppock has described the third decan of Sagittarius as symbolizing the last all-or-nothing moment, getting something done just in time, with whatever reserves remain. He specifically mentioned choosing the rider or the vehicle, which seemed fitting. Cassini delivered data back to scientists until its last moments before disintegrating.

It was a very dramatic third-decan-of-Sagittarius moment in history if I do say so, and even NASA uses words like ‘thrilling’, ‘daring’, and ‘exciting’ to describe the mission (although they would surely cringe from ear to ear at relations being drawn to astrological symbolism, sorry/not sorry, NASA!).

[Image 3: a bi-wheel event chart showing the Launch time in the center portion and the time on Earth that we received the final transmission.]

I thought this was such a neat story and so of course, I looked up the charts, which I’m sharing in a biwheel for visual convenience, not because I’m employing any specific technique. Now to be fair, I’m no mundane astrologer, and I’m totally anthropomorphizing a space mission and its robot, like some sort of ‘Johnny 5 goes to outer space’ plot. That being said, I thought this was fun to look at and wanted to share!

Triple word score for any Short Circuit fans out there.

I read several pieces of tertiary literature for this impromptu book report, but this was one of the cooler time tables I found:

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/.../cassini-end-of-mission.../