"JET PROPULSION LAB, Calif. — The first spacecraft to orbit Saturn will never be available for a museum to preserve and display.
Now in the final hours of a collision course with the ringed planet, NASA's Cassini spacecraft will plunge into Saturn's atmosphere on Friday (Sept. 15), where it will break apart, melt and disintegrate. After almost 20 years in space, 13 of which at Saturn, Cassini will not even leave a mark in the planet's clouds — it will simply go silent and fade away."
