"And then… we're going to look on the dark side of Saturn at that point where Cassini will be plunging into the atmosphere, looking in the near-infrared and the ultraviolet, trying to get some pictures of Cassini's final home inside the planet Saturn itself," explained Nasa project scientist Linda Spilker. Earl Maize, Cassini project manager previously explained the spacecraft’s final signal would be its swan song: “It isn’t truly over for us on Earth as long as we’re still receiving its signal.”

Cassini’s last data relays were picked up by NASA’s Deep Space Network complex in Canberra, Australia. "The Cassini mission has been packed full of scientific firsts, and our unique planetary revelations will continue to the very end of the mission as Cassini becomes Saturn's first planetary probe, sampling Saturn's atmosphere up until the last second," said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. What Cassini taught us and what’s next

Inspired to learn more after flybys of Saturn by NASA’s Voyager missions, the Cassini mission was designed to be an international effort that united NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. “Cassini’s discovery of ocean worlds at Titan and Enceladus changed everything, shaking our views to the core about surprising places to search for potential life beyond Earth.”

And the spacecraft itself, as well as its instruments, are informing future missions like NASA’s Europa Clipper mission to explore Jupiter’s icy moon, launching in the 2020s.
After 20 years "floating" the Solar System, the Cassini space probe to the Saturn system ends the mission with a controlled fall into the atmosphere of the planet.