The Last Images From Doomed Space Probes - Gizmodo Australia

In its final days, Cassini was running out of fuel, and NASA didn’t want to risk an out-of-control probe crashing into (and contaminating) one of those moons.

When Cassini hit Saturn’s atmosphere, it likely burned up and disintegrated within a few minutes, according to NASA.

Along with other data it was taking during its fatal plunge, the spacecraft sent images back to Earth.

The last image, above, depicts a looming Saturn — huge in Cassini’s field of view — that welcomes Cassini on its final fall.

While Cassini’s final image covers a luminous swath of Saturn’s surface, the last view from NASA’s Opportunity rover was just a flicker of light through a dark Martian sky.

Cassini’s plunge into Saturn’s atmosphere was thrilling, yes, but imagine the sound a craft would make hitting a rocky world’s surface at full speed.

It was the last image the trailblazing spacecraft would send; later that day, it crashed just north of the planet’s Shakespeare basin.

Having piggybacked to Saturn aboard Cassini, the Huygens probe was charged with descending through the atmosphere of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, which some astrobiologists believe could host microbial life.

Once the probe landed — scientists weren’t sure if the surface would be liquid or solid; it turned out to be the latter — it began snapping images of its alien surroundings.

Titan remains the most distant surface humans have landed a spacecraft on.

Four of those landers — Venera 9, 10, 13, and 14 — returned images from the Venusian surface.

Venus’ surface is nearly 900 degrees Fahrenheit, with the pressure of many dozens of Earth atmospheres.

Venera 13 survived only about two hours on the hostile planet, sending panoramic images back to Earth.

One of those images was in colour: The landscape appears yellow due to the dense atmosphere.

While NASA made it to Venus with the Magellan mission, the spacecraft never reached the planet’s surface.

Its last panorama shows the crater that became its final resting place.

Though they’re not truly dead, the Voyager probes are on a one-way mission out of the solar system, and their last images were captured in 1990?

The picture above was taken in February 1990, when Voyager 1 — the farthest human-made object — was 3.7 billion miles from the Sun, just 30 days before the craft shut down its cameras to conserve energy for the long journey ahead.

(The spacecraft is still chugging along, now 14.2 billion miles from the Sun and detecting all kinds of weird phenomenon.) This blurry image was Carl Sagan’s idea; he had suggested to NASA that one of the Voyager probes look back at Earth, revealing our world as a “pale blue dot” in the vastness of space.

This unparalleled portrait of humanity was captured just half an hour before Voyager shut down its cameras.