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Article snippet: PASADENA, Calif. — The last picture show from Saturn has begun. The final photographs taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft are streaming back to Earth. Early Friday morning, the last of the last will arrive. They include some of the favorite subjects over Cassini’s 13-year stay in orbit: the rings, the moons Enceladus and Titan, and Saturn itself. One image yet to arrive will be the spot where Cassini will disintegrate on Friday, by deliberate design. The spacecraft is accelerating to its end as it dips a bit deeper into Saturn’s atmosphere. High above the cloud tops, the atmosphere is still thin, nearly a vacuum. “The analog of that on Earth might be where the International Space Station is,” Earl Maize, Cassini’s project manager, said at a news conference on Wednesday. But at the speed Cassini will be flying, about 76,000 miles per hour, the force of even a few molecules from Saturn’s atmosphere will be enough to tear the spacecraft to pieces. “Cassini will be vaporized in maybe two minutes,” Dr. Maize said. “But I think more like one. It’s just inevitable.” That is exactly as he and his team planned it. With Cassini’s fuel running low, NASA is cleaning up after itself, leaving the Saturn system as pristine as it found it. Any spacecraft, even one launched in 1997, has unwanted microbial hitchhikers aboard. In particular, planetary scientists want to ensure that there is zero chance of the spacecraft crashing and contaminating Titan or Enceladus, two moons that c... Link to the full article to read more