A billion miles from Earth, a thirteen year mission of exploring Saturn came to a close. On September 15, 2017 the Jet Propulsion Lab and NASA retired the Cassini spacecraft in a spectacular fashion, by crashing it into the atmosphere of the planet.

The end of the Cassini mission was celebrated by JPL in a live broadcast, counting down the moments to the loss of transmission. As part of this historic moment, Machine Age Media created a short mission overview segment and a series of interstitials to be used throughout the broadcast. We drew upon a series of interviews with prominent scientists done by JPL producer Jim Round to form the main story, as well as an “End of Mission” animation featurette from 3D artist Erik Wernquist to illustrate Cassini’s journey around Saturn. And of course, we had a spectacular trove of Cassini images to pull from, as well as the JPL video archive.

We are proud to be a part of this chapter in NASA’s space exploration history.