By the time we heard it end, it had been over for 83 minutes.
Cassini kept its antenna on Earth to the last second, transmitting while it burned. The signal crossed 1.5 billion kilometers of nothing, arrived at a dish in Canberra, and flattened into noise at 11:55 UTC. The spacecraft itself had already been gone since 10:32, spacecraft time. For 83 minutes we listened to a ghost.
It ended on purpose. Cassini was nearly out of propellant, and two of the moons it discovered to be habitable oceans could not be risked. So it was flown into the planet it came to study, still doing science on the way down.
Imagery: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute / ESA / University of Arizona. Trajectory on this page is re-derived from the public encounter dates; where geometry is representative rather than computed, the page says so.
A billion kilometers from home, a parachute opens.
Huygens was cut loose on Christmas Day with a push of 35 centimeters per second and a slow spin for stability. Then it coasted, silent and unpowered, for twenty days. No one could steer it. No one could wake it early. Three redundant timers were the only things awake on board.
What follows runs on the reconstructed record: the real clock times, the real parachute sequence, the real failures. The terrain below is procedural, drawn to match what the descent camera saw; the photographs that appear in the film strip are the real ones. One radio channel is about to be lost forever, and you will hear about it the way the team did.
Earth cannot help. Light from Titan takes 67 minutes to get home. Every clock on this page runs twice: once at the spacecraft, once on Earth.
You can change speed or scrub at any moment. Sound is off by default; the toggle below reconstructs the wind from the measured descent profile.