One last photo

It's strange watching a decade's work crash and burn into oblivion, but that is the inevitable fate of The Hobbit. Everything comes to an end eventually.

We called him The Hobbit because he is due to be followed by the Saturn probe, which we speculated would be called The Lord of the Rings, a joke we'd be stuck with, bored with and helplessly attached to for the next ten years. I watched the project grow from the initial flipchart plans, an explorer that would pass Jupiter's moons, giving us insight into their make-up, launching landers onto Ganymede and Callisto in search of the secret underground oceans believed to exist there, and pass through the gushing water jets of Europa, searching for signs of life.

And the Hobbit made it, just as Bilbo did, mission accomplished, it survived the launch, then we waited, year upon year, until it reached it's destination, Jupiter, the 62 moons that we knew virtually nothing about, and it ducked and dived it's way through the chaos of rocks, mining data, sending back information it will take us years to analyse. The landers landed safely and began sending back their own live feeds. The Hobbit flew on, through Europa's cascading plumes of water, a well-earned shower after ten years' hard toil.

Europa is our best chance of finding life, some micro-bacteria in the water, proof that we are not alone in the universe, proof that the Earth is not a one-off, if there is life on Europa, Ganymede, or even Callisto, then life must be common, not just in our solar system but throughout the universe, billions of planets flooded with life, and with so much life, surely mankind can't be alone, there must be a sibling race, as intelligent as our own, more so perhaps, one where Donald Trump could never get elected.

But the Hobbit will never come back, unlike Bilbo, unlike Frodo, it is fated to die. And like good scientists we have carefully plotted his death, with his batteries all used up he will take a fateful lunge through the atmosphere of Jupiter itself, recording every second, sending back incredible, unique images and data, through the Hobbit's death plunge we will see Jupiter's clouds, it's air, as if peeling back Jupiter's skin to reveal the flesh underneath.

But before that last death dive, a snap of the Earth as it looks from the other side of the solar system.

It's be the first thing we look at as The Hobbit begins its descent.

Snap, it is done, and The Hobbit hits Jupiter's atmosphere and plummets, but it is not dead yet, it's pulse still beats, and the live feed continues to stream mountains of data.

And before the feed dies we get a picture on the big screen for the whole team to see, it gets a huge cheer. This is how The Hobbit sees us, a dot. We zoom in on the dot, and there we are, The Earth, a little ball of life, perhaps the only ball of life in the universe. Perhaps. We shall see.

And next to the Earth another dot, our moon, we zoom in, the moon looks strange, there is something behind it, on the dark side. Zoom, zoom, zoom. There, we can make them out, dots, dots, dots. We zoom in more, zoom, zoom, zoom.

They are not dots. They are, if you calculate the scale, each the size of a small town, hundreds, perhaps thousands of town-sized balls, snaking off in a line from the moon's surface, invisible to mankind, until now, as if the moon had a secret tail, or it's own secret cache of moons, or as if an invading fleet was camped on the moon's dark side, invisible to mankind, waiting.