Column on Cassini Spacecraft

When I was young, I wished to become an astronomer. Every once an in a while, I look at NASA pictures and read some material on cosmology.

It is odd that I feel some sadness as a spacecraft, a machine, burned up in the atmosphere of Saturn on Friday the 15^th. It traveled around 4 billion miles. I somehow feel that it has some courage to go so far. It sent us pictures of  an enormous hurricane on the planet.

As a boy, I learned of nine moons of Saturn. As it orbited Saturn, the spacecraft found new moons of the approximately 60 that orbit the planet. Even at the end, 20 years after launch, Cassini and its instruments remained in good working shape.  Any spacecraft could carry unwanted microbes aboard. Probably the biggest unexpected discovery of the Cassini mission was the subsurface ocean on a small icy moon.  The water on this moon and the carbon compounds it contains are some of the key ingredients needed for life that did not seem likely on a moon just 313 miles wide. Planetary scientists wanted to ensure that there was zero chance of the spacecraft crashing into and contaminating the moon Enceladus. which could also be hospitable for life due to hydrothermal vents as in our oceans.  (Some wonder if life here could have been seeded from a meteor).

When I was young the best telescopes unveiled the beauty of the rings of Saturn. Cassini viewed the rings of Saturn in much more detail. It is possible that some of the rings formed relatively recently, in astronomical time, maybe a mere 100 million years.

In its last days, Cassini dove through the gap between Saturn and the planet’s innermost ring. That provided new, sharp views of the rings and allowed the craft to probe the planet’s interior. The mission was named after Cassini, a French-Italian astronomer. He discovered four major moons of Saturn — in the 1670s and 1680s. Titan, the largest moon, was spotted by a Dutch astronomer, Huygens, a couple of decades earlier. The Huygens probe — the European Space Agency portion of this collaborative mission, which landed on Titan in 2005 — was named after him.

The entire cost of a 20 year mission was 4 billion dollars.

John Calvin could see creation as the “theater of God’s glory.”   “Wherever you cast your eyes, there is no spot in the universe wherein you cannot discern at least some sparks of his glory. You cannot in one glance survey this most vast and beautiful system of the universe, in its wide expanse, without being completely overwhelmed by the boundless force of its brightness. ...This skillful ordering of the universe is for us a sort of mirror in which we can contemplate God, who is otherwise invisible “(Inst., I. v. 1).  For some, understanding more of the cosmos seems to diminish its mystery. If one approaches it form the angle of creation, it may well serve to increase a sense of grandeur. I love a picture that spots the Earth as a tiny star- like object from Saturn, just as I was captured by Apollo 8’s picture of the Earth as a blue marble in the abyss of space. People were encouraged to smile when the photograph was being taken from so far away.

In a universe that is seemingly lifeless in so many places, life is present here, with lives capable of building a spacecraft to explore  our segment of the universe. Out of all the expanse of creation, out of a history that stretches over 10 billion years, God knows us, calls us by name, and was even incarnate as a human being, Jesus Christ.