Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

With the NASA/ESA Cassini spacecraft nose-diving into Saturn on September 15, there are a number of moving messages from those attached to the now-gone spacecraft.

Among them, Carolyn Porco, Cassini Imaging Team leader and director of the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations (CICLOPS) at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “We came. We Saw. It’s done.”

Dying essence

Porco noted on the scientist’s “Captain’s Log” via her Facebook page: “A kiloton explosion, spread out against the sky in a pyrrhic display of light and fire, a dazzling flash to signal the dying essence of a lone emissary from another world. As if the myths of old had foretold the future, the great patriarch will consume his child. At that point, that golden machine, so dutiful and strong, will enter the realm of history, and the toils and triumphs of this long march will be done,” she writes.

Porco underscores those that were appointed long ago to undertake the journey.

“It has been a taxing three decades, requiring a level of dedication that I could not have predicted, and breathless times when we sprinted for the duration of a marathon. But in return, we were blessed to spend our lives working and playing in that promised land beyond the Sun,” she adds.

Cassini navigation team watch data come in from the spacecraft during its final plunge into Saturn, Friday, Sept. 15, 2017 at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

Cassini team members embrace after the spacecraft was deliberately plunged into Saturn, Friday, Sept. 15, 2017 at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

Historic epoch

Cassini’s imaging team served as the “documentarians” of Cassini’s historic epoch and returned a stirring visual record of the spacecraft’s travels around Saturn and the glories that were found there. “This is our gift to the citizens of planet Earth,” Porco notes.

“It is doubtful we will soon see a mission as richly suited as Cassini return to this ringed world and shoulder a task as colossal as we have borne over the last 27 years,” Porco concludes: “To have served on this mission has been to live the rewarding life of an explorer of our time, a surveyor of distant worlds. We wrote our names across the sky. We could not have asked for more.”