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Comment by Buttons840 | Hacker News Reader

That final paragraph about the members of the Cassini team having watching their kids grow and have children of their own during the 30 years of the mission kind of struck me. I wonder what things are like for them when their mission comes to such a sudden end?

I suspect they'll have to spend some time analyzing the data, possibly months (I'm not really sure how long), but then it's over. What do they do? Take a long vacation and then pick up another project at NASA? Or have they been working on multiple projects this whole time, and it will be more like a developer shipping a new feature, you celebrate for a few minutes then move on to the next priority?

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They will be working on designing, simulating, and building new missions to the outer planets. It's really important to have a roadmap for long-term exploration rather than doing one-shot missions, so you don't lose the expertise. The National Academy of Science works on this roadmap, and NASA generally follows it (see http://sites.nationalacademies.org/SSB/SSB_052297, in particular the Planetary Science survey from 2011).

It's a very exciting time for planetary science, especially regarding the "Ocean Worlds" (those moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune that have liquid water: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/infographic.view.php?i...).

One of particular interest is Europa Clipper (https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/europa-clipper/), although Europa is a moon of Jupiter.

I don't know what shape the team's careers will take, but this is anything but sudden for them. Planning for this started about a decade ago.

I remember years ago reading about all the options they were considering, including some really ambitious ones, like moving it to another gas giant over the course of decades. But costs would be high, failure a real possibility, and fuel very low. So we got the amazing last few months of images and science. And now comes the fiery end, with some final data and no chance to accidentally crash on Enceladus or Titan.

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