Farewell, Cassini.

You may have missed this, what with hurricanes, floods, missile launches and wildfires, but an icon of space exploration died last week.

Cassini, launched in 1997 to explore Saturn, went into orbit around the ringed planet in 2004 and continued to send back a treasure trove of information on the planet and its moons for 13 years. It was the first probe to orbit Saturn. It was built and operated at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. It showed scientists the structure of Saturn’s rings and delivered a probe to its moon, Titan, the first landing of a spacecraft in the outer solar system.

It revealed water jets streaming from the southern pole of the Saturn moon Enceladus and revealed that Titan is a land of methane lakes. The presence of water provides one of the requirements for the evolution of biological life, marking that moon a target for future missions in search of life beyond Earth.

Overall, NASA scientists call Cassini one of the most successful planetary science missions in history. Virtually everything students today learn about Saturn from their science textbooks comes from information collected by Cassini.

I feel a certain fondness for Cassini because of a connection to Wichita, Kansas, in the form of a JPL propulsion engineer, Todd Barber, who was part of the Cassini team back in 1997.

Barber is a graduate of Wichita Southeast High School and returns to Kansas on a regular basis to offer educational programs and encouragement to budding scientists at the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson. He once told me in an interview that he considered it a priority to “make sure that least one smart kid a year grows up to be a scientist instead of a lawyer.”

The launch of Cassini and an Earth flyby two years later to give it a “slingshot” toward Saturn were not without controversy. Cassini carried 72.3 pounds of plutonium-238 fuel to generate electricity to power its probes. That generated some alarm among people worried that an accident at launch or during the Earth flyby would result in that nuclear fuel being spilled into the atmosphere.

Neither happened. The launch was without incident, and the flyby on Aug. 18, 1999, pushed Cassini on its way toward the ringed planet and into history. I felt a touch of pride that I personally knew a rocket scientist who helped make that happen.

NASA scientists made the decision in April 2017 to point Cassini toward Saturn and allow it enter the atmosphere and disintegrate after it ran out of fuel. They feared that leaving it aloft would risk having it pushed into one of Saturn’s moons.

Cassini’s final gift to science was its transmission of data on the atmosphere of Saturn, moments before it vaporized. That data will help researchers understand how Saturn was formed and what it is made of. They hope it will help solve the mystery of the speed of Saturn’s rotation.

I admit to being a space exploration buff. How could you be a high-schooler when Neil Armstrong took “one giant leap for mankind” and not be a space buff?

There are those who would argue that we can longer afford space exploration. To me that’s the equivalent of saying that we can’t afford to expand knowledge or to stretch the limits of discovery. I hope there are those who want to see future missions to explore those water jets on Enceladus, to collect a few molecules of that water and find out if they harbor any signs of life.

You did your job well, Cassini. Farewell.