Spark and Perl go looking
Look at Saturn’s rings!
Is there a spacecraft here?
Not any more.
A spacecraft called Cassini lived here for thirteen years.
What did it find?
Fountains of ice, spraying out of Enceladus.
And under that ice, a whole ocean.
So where did it go?
At the very end, it flew into Saturn on purpose, and burned up like a shooting star.
On purpose? Why?
So it could never crash onto Enceladus.
It might have carried germs from Earth into that ocean.
No — Cassini is gone.
But Saturn is still there: a bright, steady, yellowish star, and in a small telescope, its rings.
Where the map is clear, this climbs high in the sky. The darker the shading, the lower it stays. Where the map is black, it never comes up. No shading at all: where you live makes no difference.
Space
Which one does not belong?
Read on
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