Mission over: The final countdown to Cassini's fatal plunge into Saturn

Cassini's final bonanza of data, transmitted as weak radio signals, will take 83 minutes to travel 1.5 billion km at the speed of light to reach the giant dish antennas in Canberra

When the Cassini space probe makes its final descent into Saturn later today, data from the final nine hours of the mission will be sent back to NASA’s tracking station in Canberra, Australia.

As the probe descends, it will capture images and data from Saturn and its atmosphere, revealing more of the planet’s secrets. Under the spacecraft’s normal operations, its instruments first store and later forward images and data to Earth.

But in Cassini’s final hours, it will be transmitting home in real time, with the signals picked up by the CSIRO-managed Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex (CDSCC).

The CDSCC