Applause for the demise of a ship. Not your usual reaction, but this was not your usual voyage. It was a 20-year voyage from Earth to Saturn, and it finally ended early this morning — Earth time — when the Cassini spaceship burned up in the atmosphere of the giant planet. “The signal from the spacecraft is gone,” announced a NASA flight controller from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “I’m going to call this the end of [the] mission.” Restrained applause rippled through the crowd of project scientists and others listening to the announcement nearby at California Institute of Technology, where they’d gathered to witness Cassini’s final moments. There was a sense of triumph and satisfaction at the success of the joint NASA European Space Agency mission, which delivered volumes of new information on the massive, ringed gas planet and its moons since it went into orbit in 2004, after a seven-year voyage, and delivered a lander to Titan, one of the moons. But there was
