What will happen to Cassini on completion of its mission in 2008?
June 2008 marks the end of Cassini’s “primary mission” – the pre-planned four-year tour of the Saturn system. But engineers are confident the spacecraft will keep going for several more years. Scientists will doubtless want to revisit some of the moons, perhaps to get close-ups of any particularly fascinating features, and even if most of Cassini’s fuel has been used, it will be able to adjust its trajectory slowly, using Titan’s gravity, to reach most parts of the system. Eventually, of course, the fuel tanks will be nearly empty. The team will then have four options. They could put Cassini in a long-term stable orbit, taking measurements for years to come. Or they could let it go out in a blaze of glory and fly it straight into Saturn, just as the Galileo spacecraft plunged into Jupiter in 2003, collecting fascinating data as it falls. Or it could crash-land on Titan, although that might risk polluting the moon with nuclear material from the spacecraft’s fuel cells. And the last opti
