
Cassini has crashed into Saturn - _1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/09/15/the-cassini-spacecraft-just-crashed-into-saturn/?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_cassini-801am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.d3221ee3501f
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ccozan
Final Images ( choose Grand Finale )

[https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/galleries/images/](https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/galleries/images/)

I wonder if it got destroyed or just lost the signal due to the atmosphere.

Amazing times to live.

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liberte82
Incredible. It's easy to forget that it's not so long ago that our not-too-
distant ancestors looked up at the sky and noticed that these stars wandered
in the sky a little bit differently from the others. What they would have
thought if they'd have known that we would be sending probes to these places
and sending images home.

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jlebrech
we've probably seeded it now with bacteria from earth.

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pavel_lishin
That's actually an interesting question - are there layers of Saturn's
atmosphere where Earth-borne bacteria could survive? Someplace where the
temperature and pressure are capable of supporting life, and where there might
be some nutrients for them to feed on?

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fredley
Well if there are any tardigrades on board they'd probably be able to survive:

> Individual species of tardigrades can survive extreme conditions that would
> be rapidly fatal to nearly all other known life forms, including complete
> global mass extinction events due to astrophysical events, such as
> supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, large asteroid impacts, or passing-by stars.
> Some tardigrades can withstand temperatures down to 1 K (−458 °F; −272 °C)
> (close to absolute zero) while others can withstand 420 K (300 °F; 150 °C)
> for several minutes, pressures about six times greater than those found in
> the deepest ocean trenches, ionizing radiation at doses hundreds of times
> higher than the lethal dose for a human, and the vacuum of outer space. They
> can go without food or water for more than 30 years, drying out to the point
> where they are 3% or less water, only to rehydrate, forage, and reproduce.

From Wikipedia:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade)

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jacquesm
They'd survive for a while but in the end they'd have to live _off_ something,
what would they live off on Saturn?

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merricksb
Earlier discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15256418](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15256418)

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liberte82
This links to the same post

