Cassini put up a good fight.
The NASA Saturn probe fired its thrusters full bore for at least 91 seconds during its suicide plunge into the ringed planet on Sept. 15, battling hard to keep its antenna pointed at Earth for as long as possible, mission team members said.
"Given that Cassini wasn't designed to fly into a planetary atmosphere, it's remarkable that the spacecraft held on as long as it did, allowing its science instruments to send back data to the last second," Cassini project manager Earl Maize, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. "It was a solidly built craft, and it did everything we asked of it." [
No comments:
Post a Comment