Artist's concept of Cassini diving between Saturn and its innermost ring. (Image Cassini/NASA)
In the coming days you may hear in the media that the Cassini-Huygens probe has entered the final stage of its journey after orbiting Saturn for the last 13 years, and that it will be destroyed when it enters the planet’s atmosphere in just over 4 months.
ATN played a significant role in the project. In fact, back in 1993 when Tecnologica moved from Madrid to Seville, the project was already in full swing and both the Project Manager, Flora, and its Director, Giuseppe, had an intense period trying to manage a highly complex project as best they could. We must not forget that back then we did not have the management systems that we have now and many of the automatic controls that now operate alone were then operated manually, through the management of some marvellous tables embedded in the early version of the vCPFS, called TLCPL and the USERQTY. It was launched in 1997 and it travelled through cold space for 7 years until it reached its target. In 2005, the Huygens probe landed on Titan and transmitted as much data as possible for two and a half hours.
Now it is the Cassini’s turn, but we are already working hard on JUICE, a probe designed to explore the frozen moons of Jupiter. Few people in the world will get the chance to touch objects that will travel to other planets in our solar system, and it should be a source of pride to all of us that we have been able to make this achievement possible. Thanks to everyone for making us better every day.