NASA's Cassini probe is plunging to its death.
The nuclear-powered spacecraft has orbited Saturn for 13 years, and sent back hundreds of thousands of images. The photos include close-ups of the gaseous giant, its famous rings, and its enigmatic moons — including Titan, which has its own atmosphere, and icy Enceladus, which has a subsurface ocean that could conceivably harbor microbial life.
To prevent Cassini from crashing into and contaminating any of those hidden oceans, the space agency has directed the craft, which is running out of fuel, onto a crash course with Saturn.
On Monday, the space probe conducted the first of its final five orbits around the planet, dipping into Saturn's atmosphere, according to NASA. It's all part of the "Grand Finale" for the $3.26-billion, 20-year mission, which will end on September 15 as the spacecraft dives to its demise and burns up like a meteor.
"As it makes these five dips into Saturn, followed by its final plunge, Cassini will become the first Saturn atmospheric probe," Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at JPL, said in a press release. "It's long been a goal in planetary exploration to send a dedicated probe into the atmosphere of Saturn, and we're laying the groundwork for future exploration with this first foray."
These last passes will reveal new data about Saturn, its atmosphere and clouds, the materials making up its rings, and the mysterious gravity and magnetic fields of the gas planet.
"It's Cassini's blaze of glory," Spilker previously told Business Insider. "It will be doing science until the very last second."
Here's what the probe's final spiral is revealing so far.
The clouds on Saturn look like strokes from a cosmic brush because of the wavy way that fluids interact in Saturn's atmosphere.
Many of the narrow F ring's faint and wispy features result from its gravitational interactions with Prometheus, which is 53 miles (86 kilometers) across.
To capture the image above, Cassini gazed toward the rings beyond Saturn's sunlit horizon. Along the limb (the planet's edge) at left can be seen a thin, detached haze. This haze vanishes toward the right side of the scene.
In the image above, the light of a new day on Saturn illuminates the planet’s wavy cloud patterns and the smooth arcs of its vast rings. This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 10 degrees above their plane.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft looks toward the night side of Saturn's moon Titan in a view that highlights the extended, hazy nature of the moon's atmosphere. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.2 million miles (2 million kilometers) from Titan.
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