Fiery farewell to cap Cassini spacecraft's 13-year Saturn mission

(Reuters) - U.S. space agency NASA’s Cassini spacecraft will end its groundbreaking 13-year mission to Saturn on Friday with a meteor-like plunge into the ringed planet’s atmosphere, transmitting data until the final fiery moment.

Cassini, the first spacecraft to orbit Saturn, is expected to lose contact with Earth at 7:55 a.m. EDT (1155 GMT) shortly after it enters the gas giant’s crushing atmosphere at about 70,000 miles per hour (113,000 km per hour), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said.

Cassini’s final transmissions are expected to include unprecedented data from the atmosphere’s upper fringe about 1,190 miles (1,915 km) above Saturn’s cloud tops. The data will take 86 minutes to reach NASA antennas in Canberra, Australia.

FILE PHOTO: The spacecraft Cassini is pictured above Saturn's northern hemisphere prior to making one of its Grand Finale dives in this NASA handout illustration obtained by Reuters August 29, 2017. NASA/Handout via REUTERS

“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’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said at a briefing on Wednesday.

Cassini’s final dive will end 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.