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A Cassini Researcher Talks About Two Decades Of Exploration Coming To An End

For the past six months, I've been checking in with Hunter Waite. He's a Southwest Research Institute planetary scientist, and a principal investigator on the Cassini spacecraft. 

Cassini has been circling Saturn and its moons for 13 years. It's chanted what we know about each planet it has orbited. This morning it executed a planned descent into Saturn's atmosphere and was destroyed.

What I've been interested in is what's it like to be on a project that can transcend human knowledge on a near weekly basis, what it means to be a an explorer, and what happens when that weekly fix on data no one has ever seen...stops. 

In addition to granting us several interviews, Waite told us all about it live on stage on our show Worth Repeating

Paul Flahive can be reached at Paul@tpr.org