Cassini "crashes" into Saturn

Except that they didn’t take extra care with Huygens. Read the quoted excerpts from my post again. The Huygens probe was NOT sterilized.

That’s why there was “[n]o mention of extra sterilization procedures done on Huygens” in the Nova episode – because there apparently weren’t any. (Of course, they could have discussed why this decision was made instead of glossing over the issue.)

Since they also state that the entire Cassini-Huygens mission was determined to be “Category II” mission, I take that to mean that the Cassini orbiter was not sterilized either.