#orbiters

Okay, does anybody else get really emotional about the Cassini orbiter?  I was there for the mourning of Oppy, and that was crushing, but, for whatever reason, any mention of Cassini totally wrecks me; I went to space camp in Huntsville, Alabama when I was like 13, and the documentary they showed us had me in tears, and the episode focused on it on How the Universe Works never fails to do the same.  I think it has a lot to do with how we view it and its fellow probes, honestly.  Many of the people responsible for this fantastically successful mission personified it and gave it human characteristics/thoughts whenever they mentioned it, especially speaking on its death.  I mean, we send these little robots hundreds of millions of miles from home because we can’t go ourselves, and we leave a little part of ourselves in every metal panel, every camera, every piece of recording equipment so that it may relay the universe’s message, its story that we can unravel through the data we collect, back to us.  The way that Cassini kept going until the last second, too, years after the mission was supposed to end and being obliterated by air resistance Saturn’s upper atmosphere, makes it feel like it really was just trying its hardest to assist us in our mission of understanding.