Details revealed about Trump’s space policy?

9:24 am

Detailed comments by former congressman Robert Walker, who is advising the Trump transition team on space policy, yesterday provided some further hints at what the space policy will be during a Trump administration.

Walker said that there is an intent that the National Space Council be re-instituted so as to guide all space activities. civilian, military, and commercial. Walker went on to say that the Trump team is looking for a space policy that is “disruptive, resilient, and enduring”.

For one thing, Walker said that they are looking for a much longer life for the ISS – and that it will need to be refurbished and upgraded. He speculated that it would need to be handed over to an organization or consortium eventually. They are also looking for opportunities to have the commercial sector backfill for NASA so that NASA can focus on deep space exploration. Walker was very clear on this point noting that there was an awareness of many government programs that “take a decade to do with technology that ends up being out of date”.

…Walker was asked several times about SLS/Orion – in the context of Trump’s recent comments about Boeing and Air Force One. Walker did not answer the questions specifically but went into a broader generalization that Trump is not a politician but rather that he is a deal maker. He also thought that Trump’s funding of an ice rink in New York a few years back was a good example of what kind of president he’d be. Walker went on to say that Vice President-elect Pence would be the de-facto “prime minister” and run the government while Donald Trump went out to cut deals.

The issue of Earth science eventually came up. Walker said that the Trump administration is not looking to cancel NASA climate science but rather that they wanted to transfer all of it to other agencies who might have greater expertise. Earth centric research would be transferred so as to allow NASA to focus on space exploration.

It remains unclear whether SLS/Orion will survive a Trump administration. I suspect that at this point they themselves don’t know. They intend to shift climate research from NASA to NOAA, cutting some of that funding as they do so while also changing the personnel that run the research (thus cleaning house). They also probably want to shift NASA’s publicly-stated deep space goals back to the Moon, but this will simply be the empty rhetoric of politicians. More important is the suggestion that they want to extend the life of ISS. Such an action will also require an extension of the commercial crew/cargo contracts, which will also help continue to fuel the new space industry.

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SpaceX’s loses launch contract due to scheduling delays

9:11 am

Because of SpaceX’s decision to delay its next launch into early January, Inmarsat today decided to switch launch companies for a mid-2017 satellite, dropping SpaceX and signing a contract with Arianespace.

Inmarsat is not abandoning SpaceX, only switching to Arianespace for one satellite. Nonetheless, this decision, coming only one day after SpaceX confirmed the delay, explains to me why SpaceX has been saying for months it intended to resume launches before the end of 2017. Inmarsat had probably told the company that if they delayed into January, they would lose this launch. When SpaceX finally admitted they couldn’t meet the 2016 launch deadline, Inmarsat made the switch.

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Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

Two new studies say different things about Greenland’s icecap history

9:00 am

The uncertainty of science: Two new studies of Greenland’s icecap suggest completely opposite histories, with one saying that Greenland was ice free at least once in the past 2.6 million years, with the other saying that the icecap covered Greenland continuously for the past 7.5 million years.

Evidence buried in Greenland’s bedrock shows the island’s massive ice sheet melted nearly completely at least once in the last 2.6 million years. This suggests that Greenland’s ice may be less stable than previously believed. “Our study puts Greenland back on the endangered ice-sheet map,” says Joerg Schaefer, a palaeoclimatologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, and co-author of a paper published on 7 December in Nature.

A second paper in the same issue paints a slightly different view of the ice sheet’s past stability. A group led by Paul Bierman, a geomorphologist at the University of Vermont in Burlington, found that ice covered eastern Greenland for all of the past 7.5 million years. Experts say the two papers do not necessarily contradict one another: at times, nearly all of Greenland’s ice could have melted (as seen by Schaefer’s team) while a frosty cap remained in the eastern highlands (as seen by Bierman’s group).

If all of Greenland’s ice melted, it would raise sea levels by seven metres. Models suggest that Greenland could become ice-free as soon as 2,500 years from now, depending on the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. [emphasis mine]

This story is a perfect example of how the passionate belief in a theory (that global warming is happening, is a threat, and will melt the icecaps) can warp a scientist’s thinking. Both studies used a single drilled ice core, with the first from Greenland’s central region and the second from Greenland’s eastern region. Thus, there is no reason to say that the entire Greenland icecap had melted, as noted in the highlighted text that describes the first study. What the data merely suggests is that these two regions might have had different histories.

Instead, the article, in its effort to confirm the possibility that Greenland’s icecap could melt entirely and thus pose a threat of a big sea level rise, ignores this simple detail and struggles to justify the concept that the entire cap certainly melted in the past, even though one study suggests otherwise. This causes everyone to misunderstand the results, and draw conclusions that are uncalled for, based on the available data.

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Design flaw in India’s Mars Orbiter

8:52 pm

According to American researchers, a fundamental design flaw in the primary scientific instrument on India’s Mangalyaan Mars orbiter prevents it from carrying out its mission of measuring the methane in the Martian atmosphere.

“They did not design this properly for the detection of methane on Mars,” Michael Mumma, senior scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, told Seeker. In 2003, Mumma led a team that made the first definitive measurements of methane on Mars using an infrared telescope in Hawaii. The methane, which appeared in plumes over specific regions of Mars, reached a maximum density of about 60 parts per billion. “The (MOM) instrument is beautifully engineered, but not for the methane task. It has other value, but unfortunately they will not be able to provide measurements of methane at the levels needed to sample even the plumes we saw,” Mumma said.

They are re-purposing the instrument to measure the reflected sunlight coming off the Martian surface, useful data to be sure but hardly worth an entire space mission.

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Conscious Choice cover

Now available in hardback and paperback as well as ebook!

 

From the press release: In this ground-breaking new history of early America, historian Robert Zimmerman not only exposes the lie behind The New York Times 1619 Project that falsely claims slavery is central to the history of the United States, he also provides profound lessons about the nature of human societies, lessons important for Americans today as well as for all future settlers on Mars and elsewhere in space.

 
Conscious Choice: The origins of slavery in America and why it matters today and for our future in outer space, is a riveting page-turning story that documents how slavery slowly became pervasive in the southern British colonies of North America, colonies founded by a people and culture that not only did not allow slavery but in every way were hostile to the practice.  
Conscious Choice does more however. In telling the tragic history of the Virginia colony and the rise of slavery there, Zimmerman lays out the proper path for creating healthy societies in places like the Moon and Mars.

 

“Zimmerman’s ground-breaking history provides every future generation the basic framework for establishing new societies on other worlds. We would be wise to heed what he says.” —Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society.

 

All editions are available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all book vendors, with the ebook priced at $5.99 before discount. All editions can also be purchased direct from the ebook publisher, ebookit, in which case you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.

 

Autographed printed copies are also available at discount directly from the author (hardback $29.95; paperback $14.95; Shipping cost for either: $6.00). Just send an email to zimmerman @ nasw dot org.

SpaceX confirms its next launch will be in early January

8:38 pm

In an update today on SpaceX’s September 1 Falcon 9 launchpad explosion investigation webpage, the company announced that its next launch will take place in early January, not mid-December as indicated in recent weeks.

We are finalizing the investigation into our September 1 anomaly and are working to complete the final steps necessary to safely and reliably return to flight, now in early January with the launch of Iridium-1. This allows for additional time to close-out vehicle preparations and complete extended testing to help ensure the highest possible level of mission assurance prior to launch.

Apparently they wish to do more testing to make sure they understand exactly what they need to do to avoid the conditions that caused the September 1 explosion. At the same time, they also think that an extra few weeks will be sufficient.

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Leaving Earth cover

Leaving Earth: Space Stations, Rival Superpowers, and the Quest for Interplanetary Travel, can be purchased as an ebook everywhere for only $3.99 (before discount) at amazon, Barnes & Noble, all ebook vendors, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.

 

If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big oppressive tech companies and I get a bigger cut much sooner.

 

Winner of the 2003 Eugene M. Emme Award of the American Astronautical Society.

 
"Leaving Earth is one of the best and certainly the most comprehensive summary of our drive into space that I have ever read. It will be invaluable to future scholars because it will tell them how the next chapter of human history opened." -- Arthur C. Clarke

The weird south pole of Mars

5:45 pm

Mars' south pole region

Cool image time (literally)! The photo above, cropped slightly to show here, was taken by Mars Reconnaissance Orbit (MRO) in August 2016 and was released today as part of the monthly release of captioned images. And though it looks like a fractal computer-generated animation still, it is instead real, showing the strange and quite alien terrain that routinely forms at the carbon dioxide ice cap there.

The polar cap is made from carbon dioxide (dry ice), which does not occur naturally on the Earth. The circular pits are holes in this dry ice layer that expand by a few meters each Martian year. New dry ice is constantly being added to this landscape by freezing directly out of the carbon dioxide atmosphere or falling as snow. Freezing out the atmosphere like this limits how cold the surface can get to the frost point at -130 degrees Celsius (-200 F). Nowhere on Mars can ever get any colder this, making this this coolest landscape on Earth and Mars combined!

This region is about 4 degrees north of the south pole itself.

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USGS responds to Congressional inquiry about data tampering with blank documents

4:01 pm

Why we got Trump: In response to a demand for documents from a Congressional investigation into data manipulation that the US Geological Survey allowed two chemists to do for nearly two decades, the USGS turned over documents with almost all the pages blank.

“Are we supposed to play tic-tac-toe on this?” Gohmert asked Tuesday, while waving one of the documents during a hearing of the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations on the data manipulation. The USGS lab where two chemists skewed data for nearly two decades was finally closed in March 2016.

Gohmert’s subcommittee had requested the documents in September. The blanks received Tuesday represented only a small portion of the total sought by the panel. “We’re still waiting for documents we requested three months ago,” Gohmert said. “Some of the documents we did receive were redacted, they were duplicates or were even blank pages.”

Meanwhile, the USGS refuses to name the two chemists or describe how they were punished. For all we know, they still work there. And it is important to note, that the data manipulation took place in connection with “various energy-related topics, including coal reserves and uranium deposits.” Want to bet the manipulation was done to discourage development?

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Trump picks oil industry ally and global warming skeptic for EPA

2:49 pm

President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Oklahoma’s Attorney General, Scott Pruitt, to run the EPA.

An ally to the fossil fuel industry, Pruitt has aggressively fought against environmental regulations, becoming one of a number of attorneys general to craft a 28-state lawsuit against the Obama administration’s rules to curb carbon emissions. The case is currently awaiting a decision from the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which heard oral arguments in September.

Pruitt, who questions the impact of climate change, along with Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange, penned an op-ed in the Tulsa World earlier this year that called criticism they’ve received “un-American.” “Healthy debate is the lifeblood of American democracy, and global warming has inspired one of the major policy debates of our time,” states the op-ed. “That debate is far from settled. Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind… Dissent is not a crime.”

Not surprisingly, environmentalists have already begun the campaign to destroy him, based on the quotes at the link.

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Upcoming lectures

10:43 am

Since one of my readers asked about my future speaking appearances, I thought I’d note them here, on the main page. I will be speaking at three different venues in the next month, as follows:

The first is open to the public, but there is a $10 admission fee to the park. While the last two are free and also open to the public, I do not know what the public must do to gain access to the middle event at Vandenberg Air Force Base, as the location I think will be inside the base.

As always, all my appearances, including these, are listed in the right column below.

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Dispute in Russia over Progress failure investigation

9:06 am

The Russian mission control has publicly disavowed a report that cited mission control as saying that the failure of the Soyuz/Progress launch last week was due to the premature shutdown of the Soyuz rocket’s third stage.

First the source:

A source in the space and rocket industry told TASS that the emergency shutdown of the engines occurred after 382 seconds and at the same time the spacecraft’s separation occurred. After that, the flight control system started operating in automatic flight mode and began deploying antennas and solar batteries. However, the spacecraft failed to reach orbit and started falling and ended up being destroyed in the atmosphere.

Next the disavowal:

”Any version which are now being voiced by the media have nothing to do with reality, including the incorrect cyclogram data. The results of the commission’s work will be announced no earlier than December 20,” a spokesperson told RIA Novosti.

I must admit that the source’s suggested cause for the failure, that the rocket engine shut prematurely and the spacecraft then simply separated and began its deployment before it had reached orbital velocity and thus fell back to Earth, sounds good at first glance. However, this explanation does not explain why all communications with the spacecraft suddenly ceased.

Either way, it does appear that there is an effort within Roscosmos to spin the events in the press, prior to the completion of the investigation. This in itself is not a good sign, as it suggests that there are people there who are trying to cover their asses rather than honestly trying to find out the cause of the failure.

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UAE to issue national laws to facilitate space tourism and exploration

8:50 am

The competition heats up: At a ceremony announcing the space policy of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the head of the UAE’s space agency announced that, even as their 2020 unmanned Mars mission moves forward, they are also formulating regulations in order to encourage future space activity.

He said regulations are very important to facilitate space tourism. “You can’t have space tourism without space laws. We will address this.” For example, liability in the event of a problem is determined by the law. The UAE will issue laws regulating the space sector within a few months, he said. The laws will facilitate the UAE’s ambitious Mars Mission in 2020.

He said technology alone is not enough for all space-related activities. The laws are essential to undertake all such projects. “We can’t launch the Mars probe without (relevant) laws.” Once technology is available, regulation is the important element to use it, Al Ahbabi said. He said the draft law was ready, which would be submitted for approval of the council of ministers very soon.

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Republican Congress passes National Park bill that raises fees

9:26 pm

More bull from the House Republicans: In an effort to fix budget problems at the National Park Service, caused by years of Congressional and Presidential budget malfeasance, the lame-duck Republican-run House today passed a bill that would raise the lifetime fees for a park senior pass.

The House of Representatives moved quickly Tuesday to pass legislation designed to provide the National Park Service with badly needed funds to help the agency chip away at a staggering $12 billion maintenance backlog. However, without concurrence by the Senate by week’s end, the measure could die.

As passed by the House, the National Park Service Centennial Act would increase the price of a lifetime pass for senior citizens 62 and older to $80 from its current $10 lifetime fee. Seniors who don’t want to pay the $80 could purchase an annual pass for $20. Park Service staff estimate that the increase in the cost of a senior pass would generate $20 million a year.

It appears that already purchased lifetime passes would still be valid, though I am willing to bet that, given time, these bastards will change that as well. What really annoys me about this is that the reason the Park Service is short of funds is not really because they don’t have enough money. The budget isn’t really any smaller than it’s been for decades. The reason it is short of money is that the federal government, and the Park Service, wastes enormous amounts on things that are not essential, on pork (such as dozens and dozens of tiny park facilities spread throughout the country that are really outside the Park Service’s original purpose and exist mostly because some elected official pushed for their creation).

What these idiots never do is find ways to reduce or rearrange spending to pay for things that are important. Instead, they constantly work to suck more money from the taxpayer, endlessly. And they wonder why they got Trump.

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ExoMars’ Trace Gas Orbiter images Phobos

9:08 pm

As part of its checkout, Europe’s ExoMars’ Trace Gas Orbiter has taken test images of the Martian moon Phobos.

The camera imaged the moon on 26 November from a distance of 7700 km, during the closest part of the spacecraft’s orbit around Mars. TGO’s elliptical orbit currently takes it to within 230–310 km of the surface at its closest point and around 98 000 km at its furthest every 4.2 days. A colour composite has been created from several individual images taken through several filters. The camera’s filters are optimised to reveal differences in mineralogical composition, seen as ‘bluer’ or ‘redder’ colours in the processed image. An anaglyph created from a stereo pair of images captured is also presented, and can be viewed using red–blue 3D glasses.

The images were done to test the spacecraft’s operation, and have apparently shown that it is functioning well.

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First images from Cassini’s first Saturn ring flyby

9:01 pm

Saturn's polar vortex

Cool image time! And this is only the start. The Cassini science team has released the first images taken by Cassini during its first of 42 close flybys of the rings of Saturn. The image on the right, cropped from the full image, shows Saturn’s north polar vortex. The storm at the polar really does look like a whirlpool that is descending down into the gas giant’s depth.

I must emphasize that photography was not the focus of this first flyby. These images were taken the two days before the flyby on December 4. Later flybys are going to produce far better images, as they will be taking pictures throughout.

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Sunspot activity continues to drop

3:21 pm

NOAA yesterday posted its monthly update of the solar cycle, covering sunspot activity for November. Below is my monthly annotated version of that update.

November 2016 Solar Cycle graph

The graph above has been modified to show the predictions of the solar science community. The green curves show the community’s two original predictions from April 2007, with half the scientists predicting a very strong maximum and half predicting a weak one. The red curve is their revised May 2009 prediction.

In November sunspot activity dropped again, to the second lowest point seen since 2010. Essentially, activity today is about where it was in 2010 when the solar minimum was finally ending. Now, the solar maximum is ending and we are beginning the next solar minimum.

Throughout the entire just completed solar maximum, the Sun continuously under-performed all predictions. Even now, despite following almost precisely the prediction of the 2007 low prediction during 2014 and 2015, in 2016 the ramp down has begun to slip below that prediction. The trend continues to suggest the arrival of solar minimum will be early, possibly as early as sometime late next year.

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SpaceX to delay December 16 launch

11:50 am

I have absolutely no details at this moment, but I have found out through sources at Vandenberg Air Force Base, where I have been scheduled to give a lecture next Wednesday, December 14, that the December 16 SpaceX launch there has been delayed.

If the launch was still on they wanted to delay my talk because too many people would miss it, working instead on the launch. My lecture is now on, as the launch has been cancelled.

This is not in the news yet. Stay tuned for more details.

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Pentagon buries report documenting $125 billion of waste

11:03 am

Why the revolt? The Pentagon purposely buried a 2015 report that documented $125 billion in wasteful Defense Department spending because they feared Congress would use it to justify sequestration.

The report, which was issued in January 2015 by the advisory Defense Business Board (DBB), called for a series of reforms that would have saved the department $125 billion over the next five years. Among its other findings, the report showed that the Defense Department was paying just over 1 million contractors, civilian employees and uniformed personnel to fill back-office jobs. That number nearly matches the amount of active duty troops — 1.3 million, the lowest since 1940.

The Post reported that some Pentagon leaders feared the study’s findings would undermine their claims that years of budget sequestration had left the military short of money. In response, they imposed security restrictions on information used in the study and even pulled a summary report from a Pentagon website. “They’re all complaining that they don’t have any money,” former DBB chairman Robert Stein told the Post. “We proposed a way to save a ton of money.”

The corruption in Washington today runs very deep. It will take many years and a lot of change to fix it. Don’t expect a lot from Trump or this Republican Congress. They might be a start (maybe), but even if they worked entirely to get the federal cleaned up they couldn’t do it in the next four years. And no one should expect them to work entirely to clean this up.

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NASA awards contract for satellite refueling mission

9:15 am

NASA has awarded Space Systems/Loral a contract for building Restore-L, a robot refueling mission designed by the Goddard Space Flight Center team that ran the Hubble shuttle repair missions as well as the recent robotic demo repair tests on ISS.

The brains behind this mission is 80-year-old Frank Cepollina, who headed those Hubble shuttle missions and has been pushing for satellite repair since the 1980s. He is still going strong. As he said to me during one of my interviews for several articles I have written about him, “One of the things that’s driven me is this concept of stretching your capital assets for as long as you can to get every dollar of return you can possible get from it. The American taxpayers have paid for those assets. We should use them.”

If only we had more such Americans working in the federal government.

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Drill issues at Curiosity

9:05 am

The recent failure by Curiosity to drill has caused engineers to stop the rover in its tracks while they analyze the cause of the problem.

The rover team learned Dec. 1 that Curiosity did not complete the commands for drilling. The rover detected a fault in an early step in which the “drill feed” mechanism did not extend the drill to touch the rock target with the bit. “We are in the process of defining a set of diagnostic tests to carefully assess the drill feed mechanism. We are using our test rover here on Earth to try out these tests before we run them on Mars,” Curiosity Deputy Project Manager Steven Lee, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said Monday. “To be cautious, until we run the tests on Curiosity, we want to restrict any dynamic changes that could affect the diagnosis. That means not moving the arm and not driving, which could shake it.”

Two among the set of possible causes being assessed are that a brake on the drill feed mechanism did not disengage fully or that an electronic encoder for the mechanism’s motor did not function as expected. Lee said that workarounds may exist for both of those scenarios, but the first step is to identify why the motor did not operate properly last week.

Though they do not say so, the problem is almost certainly related to a fundamental design flaw in the drill’s design that causes intermittent short-circuits when they use it, and has the possibility of shorting out the entire rover if they are not careful.

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“Researchers baffled by nationalist surge”

8:54 am

Clueless: According to this Nature article, researchers are completed baffled by the recent surge in nationalism in Europe and the United States, best illustrated by the UK vote to leave the European Union and the victory of Donald Trump in the U.S.

The cluelessness reeks throughout every word, but I can’t quote the whole article. The following quote will give you the flavor:

Some academics have explored potential parallels between the roots of the current global political shift and the rise of populism during the Great Depression, including in Nazi Germany. But Helmut Anheier, president of the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, cautions that the economic struggles of middle-class citizens across the West today are very different, particularly in mainland Europe. The Nazis took advantage of the extreme economic hardship that followed the First World War and a global depression, but today’s populist movements are growing powerful in wealthy European countries with strong social programmes. “What brings about a right-wing movement when there are no good reasons for it?”Anheier asks.

In the United States, some have suggested that racism motivated a significant number of Trump voters. But that is too simplistic an explanation, says Theda Skocpol, a sociologist at Harvard University. “Trump dominated the news for more than a year, and did so with provocative statements that were meant to exacerbate every tension in the US,” she says.

They are like a someone throwing darts at a dart board from two feet away and missing continuously. For some reason, they can’t seem to conceive of any of these possibilities:

  • Out of control budgets that are bankrupting entire countries
  • Out of control regulation that is squelching freedom
  • Incompetent and corrupt management that results in the failure of practically every government project or effort
  • Out of control immigration that is overwhelming countries with unskilled workers as well as terrorists
  • Foreign policy stupidity that has routinely and steadily worsened the international climate in the past three decades
  • Elite arrogance that lazily uses the accusation of racism to explain everything

I could go on. You can also read this article: How We Got Trump II: 2008, 2009, 2010 to get a few concrete examples here in the U.S.

The last point above sums up this article quite nicely. Until our intellectual community stops fooling itself and starts to accept some of the responsibility for their own failures, things are only going to get worse. Their liberal policies are failing, and need to be rejected by them. And if they don’t do it, the voters will definitely do so, with increasing fury.

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Cassini makes its first close ring flyby of Saturn

2:46 pm

Cassini has begun its last year at Saturn, making its first close fly-by of the gas giant’s rings yesterday.

Cassini’s imaging cameras obtained views of Saturn about two days before crossing through the ring plane, but not near the time of closest approach. The focus of this first close pass was the engine maneuver and observations by Cassini’s other science instruments. Future dives past the rings will feature some of the mission’s best views of the outer regions of the rings and small, nearby moons.

Each of Cassini’s orbits for the remainder of the mission will last one week. The next pass by the rings’ outer edges is planned for Dec. 11. The ring-grazing orbits — 20 in all — will continue until April 22, when the last close flyby of Saturn’s moon Titan will reshape Cassini’s flight path. With that encounter, Cassini will leap over the rings, making the first of 22 plunges through the 1,500-mile-wide (2,400-kilometer) gap between Saturn and its innermost ring on April 26.

On Sept. 15, the mission will conclude with a final plunge into Saturn’s atmosphere. During the plunge, Cassini will transmit data on the atmosphere’s composition until its signal is lost.

Now for a bit of reality: When Cassini’s mission ends on September 15, 2017, it will likely be a minimum of 20 years before another spacecraft returns.

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