09/14/2017 – Ephemeris – Cassini will go out in a blaze of glory tomorrow morning

Ephemeris for Thursday, September 14th. The Sun will rise at 7:20. It’ll be up for 12 hours and 33 minutes, setting at 7:54. The Moon, 1 day past last quarter, will rise at 2:05 tomorrow morning.

Just about 24 hours from now the Cassini spacecraft will end its 20 year mission to Saturn and its 13 years of orbiting the planet. Monday, 4 days ago, it passed the great moon Titan for the last time, giving it one last gravitational boost into a suicidal plunge into Saturn’s atmosphere. At 7:55 tomorrow morning EDT (11:55 UTC), Cassini is expected to lose its stabilization in the thin upper atmosphere or Saturn and lose its connection with the Earth. It is expected to burn up, traveling at 70,000 miles an hour to become a part of the planet it investigated for 13 years. Instead of recording data for transmission to Earth later, it will be taking real-time atmospheric sampling, transmitting immediately up to the very end.

The times given are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.

Addendum

An artist’s visualization of Cassini slipping between the rings and the atmosphere of Saturn. Credit NASA/JPL.

Here’s a link to yesterday’s news conference at JPL on the end of the Cassini Mission:  https://youtu.be/gs-dscW95PE.

Link to Emily Lakdawalla’s Planetary Society post on the final days of Cassini including NASA TV coverage:  http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2017/0911-cassini-eom-timeline.html.