NASA has received the final signal from its Cassini spacecraft, which ended a groundbreaking 13-year Saturn mission with a meteor-like plunge into the planet's atmosphere, transmitting data until the final moment.
Cassini, the first spacecraft to orbit Saturn, ended its mission on Friday morning, shortly after it lost contact with Earth as it entered SAturn's crushing atmosphere at about 113,000 km per hour, NASA said.
"Our spacecraft has entered Saturn's atmosphere, and we have received its final transmission," NASA in a post on Twitter, via its official @CassiniSaturn profile.
The end of Cassini's odyssey, which began with its launch in 1997 and a seven-year journey to the ringed planet, was met with applause, hugs and tears from NASA officials after its final transmission was received, according to video footage on the space agency's website.
Cassini's final transmissions are expected to include unprecedented data from the atmosphere's upper fringe about 1,915 km above Saturn's cloud tops. The data took 86 minutes to reach NASA antennas in Canberra, Australia.
"Not only do we have an environment that just is overwhelming with an abundance of scientific mysteries and puzzles, but we've had a spacecraft that's been able to exploit it," Earl Maize, Cassini project manager at NASA said.
Cassini's final dive ended a mission that gave scientists a ringside seat to the sixth planet from the Sun.
The craft's discoveries included seasonal changes on Saturn, a hexagon-shaped pattern on the north pole and the moon Titan's resemblance to a primordial Earth.
Cassini also found a global ocean on the moon Enceladus, with ice plumes spouting from its surface. Enceladus has become a promising lead in the search for places where life could exist outside Earth.
Cassini is a cooperative project between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency, and was launched into space in October 1997 from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
Since the spacecraft was running low on fuel, NASA crashed it into Saturn to avoid any chance the spacecraft could someday collide with and contaminate Titan, Enceladus or another moon that has the potential for indigenous microbial life.
