On Sept. 15, when the Cassini spacecraft runs out of fuel and dives into Saturn’s atmosphere in a final blaze of glory, it will be taking a little piece of Wellesley with it, metaphorically speaking. During the Cassini mission, Wellesley students from majors far and wide joined forces with Professor Richard French to calculate trajectories and crunch data, leaving their mark on a NASA mission that, for some, permanently imprinted itself on their own lives.

The Cassini mission started in the 1980s, when NASA teamed up with space agencies around the world to send a robotic spacecraft into orbit around Saturn in what French describes as an effort to “really explore Saturn in every dimension: its moons, its atmosphere, its rings, the planet itself.”

Of course, reaching Saturn is no small feat, and it wasn’t until 2004 that the spacecraft finally entered Saturn’s orbit. But once it did, French and a team of international scientists began gathering data from a dozen specialized scientific instruments.

French, a planetary astronomer and professor of astrophysics and astronomy, worked with the radio-science instrument, which sent radio signals from the spacecraft to huge antennas on Earth. These radio signals were a useful tool: As they bounced off objects en route to Earth, they revealed information about those objects. One of French’s main projects involved analyzing data on how the signals bounced off Saturn’s rings to create “a profile of what the detailed structure of the rings is like.”

2008年，法国人已经在2017年通过弄清楚了无线电科学仪器的最佳轨道路径时，法国人已经有一堆关于土星的戒指。突然，他突然存在。

“It struck me as a pretty rare opportunity to share in the excitement of working on a space mission with nonscientists, because the specific project that I had, there was work that could be done that didn’t require a lot of advanced coursework,” he explains.

法国通过电子邮件向101名学生通过电子邮件发送，鼓励他们在夏天加入Wellesley的Cassini研究团队，即使他们不是科学专业。这些学生中的两个是Katie Judd'11和Rachel Snyderman'11，既是拍摄了天文学101的第一年，才能提前脱离其实验要求，发现自己意外地迷上了。

“我对参加一个正在进行的研究项目的机会很感兴趣，我把他在他的电子邮件中所说的内容所说，你不必是一个科学专业，”贾德克召回。“所以我申请了。”

After a quick crash course in computer programming, data analysis, and the mission itself, Judd and Snyderman, along with the six other members of Team Cassini (and yes, there were T-shirts), were soon completely immersed in the day-to-day of NASA research. Their days were a flurry of coding and calculations as they worked on projects that ranged from analyzing data on Saturn’s rings to determining which orbits would yield the best data through the mission’s end.

“It was a pretty amazing feat of Professor French to include so many students so early on in our Wellesley careers, and to really let us put our hands on the steering wheel,” Snyderman says, adding that a few days after learning how to code for the first time, she found herself writing code to send up to the spacecraft.

学生们还参加了电话with the entire international Cassini team, which offered a powerful lesson in what Snyderman calls “scientific diplomacy.”

“我记得它令人着迷，因为它并没有成为一个国家的使命。斯内德曼说，它变得比这更重要了。““每个Cassini研究组成部分 - 从无线电科学到戒指和大气团队 - 有自己的股份和知识，他们为团队带来了，它都是关于让步和妥协的。”

但对于贾德，夏天赋予了更重要的东西。

“就我自己的心态而言，我可以被告知我能够做科学和数学。诚实地。这听起来如此基本，但作为一个真正在那些地区充满信心的人，它真的取得了所有的不同，“她说。

And while Judd majored in political science and Latin American studies, and Snyderman earned a degree in economics and Latin American studies, both went on to take more astronomy classes, and eagerly volunteered as team leaders when French decided to continue Team Cassini with a new crop of 24 students during the 2010 academic year.

“That summer kick started what I think was an incredibly rich part of my liberal-arts experience, even though it may not be reflected in my degree,” Judd says. “It carried through Wellesley, understanding that just because you’ve chosen one major or just because you feel like you’re more equipped for one area of study, doesn’t mean you shut yourself off to others.”

Today, both continue to draw on the quantitative skills and diplomatic lessons they learned that summer, Judd as a communications specialist at the U.S Agency for International Development, and Snyderman in the U.S. Office of Management and Budget.

“我认为对我来说很整洁，因为我一直想进入公共服务，公共服务是关于工作的东西，这些东西比自己大得多，”斯奈德曼说。“这真的是我的第一次在那样工作的经历，在那里研究，使命和结果比我或我在Wellesley的四年更大。”

And while neither landed in astronomy, Cassini has never strayed far from their minds: Judd recently started following the Cassini Facebook page, intrigued by the risky maneuvers the spacecraft has been attempting in its final days, while Snyderman’s current role has given her an inside look at how federal funding works for NASA programs like Cassini.

So in mid-September, when the Cassini spacecraft ends its decades-long mission in dramatic form, Judd and Snyderman, along with the rest of Team Cassini, will be able to look on knowing that the long hours they spent in the Wellesley observatory plowing through data and wrestling with calculations are part of what made the mission such a success.