The bold end that mission designers planned for the Cassini spacecraft had a perception management challenge baked into it. After 13 years at Saturn, and 20 years since its launch, Cassini was running out of fuel. And because the wildly successful mission had discovered evidence for a potentially habitable environment beneath the surface of one of the planet’s moons, no one wanted to take the slightest chance that stowaway microbial spores inside Cassini might someday contaminate that environment thanks to a derelict spacecraft. Thus the responsible decision to plunge Cassini into Saturn’s atmosphere and burn it up like a meteor.

The challenge was that not everyone in the world could immediately see the wisdom of this decision. Some accused NASA of wasting a perfectly good, $3.5 billion discovery machine; a few referred to the end of mission as a “death dive,” even using the term suicide.

To shape this story around the facts as those working on the mission saw them, we developed the story of Cassini’s Grand Finale: A last, thrilling assignment worthy of the celebrated spacecraft explorer. We leaned in hard on the firsts and the never-befores. We pulled on the daring and the adventure of it all – dozens of dives between the planet and its rings, culminating in a final plunge that would see the spacecraft become the first Saturn atmosphere probe. We wrote explainers, hosted social media Q&As, and put our people out there as much as possible to share how they felt about the bittersweet, but necessary, end of their beloved mission.

And judging by the finale’s overall triumphant reception in the media and public – along with our team winning NASA’s first Emmy award for our campaign – I’d say we succeeded.