Cassini, the first spacecraft to orbit Saturn, ended its mission at 7 55 a.m. EDT (1155 GMT), shortly after it lost contact with Earth as it entered the gas giant's crushing atmosphere at about 70,000 miles an hour (113,000 km per hour), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASAA) said.
Its clouds of sulphuric acid, crushing atmosphere of carbon dioxide and blast-furnace surface temperature of 457°C are anything but lovely.
In 2003, NASA steered its Galileo probe, which had faithfully surveyed the Jovian system for years, into Jupiter's crushing atmosphere, to avoid the possibility of introducing terrestrial microbes to the moon Europa, which harbors water and, perhaps, life.
Despite the crushing atmosphere and the inbred crowd, Gandalf's does have two things going for it that have kept it alive this long.
Scientists already knew Venus was a strange world, afflicted with a crushing dense atmosphere, surface temperatures that would melt lead and clouds laced with sulphuric acid.
I nipped in last year, to the unwieldy cinematic environs of the O2, to find a crushing lack of atmosphere and passion.
Other than the hellish heat, a crushing carbon dioxide atmosphere and corrosive clouds of sulfuric acid, Venus is a lot like Earth, scientists said yesterday.
The "loose collective" running the site today, 90% male, operates a "crushing bureaucracy" with an "often abrasive atmosphere" that deters newcomers.
