Cassini's “Grand Finale” Will Be a Blaze of Glory

Re:Cassini's “Grand Finale” Will Be a Blaze of Glory by speps on Thursday September 14, 2017 @09:00AM (#15247485)

I see articles about Cassini's end, but they never clearly mention when the final pictures will be revealed. Any pointers please?

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Re:Cassini's “Grand Finale” Will Be a Blaze of Glory by gregwtmtno on Thursday September 14, 2017 @09:13AM (#15247601)

This timeline has an entry for when the final pictures are expected to appear online:

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2017/0911-ca...

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Re:Cassini's “Grand Finale” Will Be a Blaze of Glory by retSava on Thursday September 14, 2017 @09:16AM (#15247628)

Thanks for the link, great overview. I think this ominous line rings particularly dark and gruesome, "Cassini reconfigures from an orbiter to an atmospheric probe".

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Re:Cassini's “Grand Finale” Will Be a Blaze of Glory by 2845197541 on Thursday September 14, 2017 @10:41AM (#15248482)

It can't take pictures in Jupiter's atmosphere?

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Re:Cassini's “Grand Finale” Will Be a Blaze of Glory by gregwtmtno on Thursday September 14, 2017 @10:55AM (#15248622)

The spacecraft is at Saturn. During its final time, it will not have the transmission speed to send pictures, though it will send atmospheric measurements until the very end.

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Re:Cassini's “Grand Finale” Will Be a Blaze of Glory by JonDav on Thursday September 14, 2017 @01:48PM (#15250535)

It could, but the Deep Space Network is the bottleneck 100kbit speeds and hours round trip makes getting the data difficult in best conditions, eg. orbiting out by titan

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