The Cassini spacecraft is dancing toward death — and NASA wants to make sure it doesn’t take any alien life with it.

Since 2004 the probe has twirled around Saturn, studying the gas giant’s rings, storms and moons. But it has recently started preparing for next year, when it will plunge into the planet’s atmosphere and vaporize.

NASA chose the ringed planet as Cassini’s final resting place because the space agency doesn’t want to risk contaminating a potentially habitable world with hardy microbes that may be aboard the craft. Saturn, with its gaseous surface consumed by hydrogen and helium, is inhospitable to life.

The same may not be true for some of its moons.

Titan, the biggest Saturnian satellite, has an atmosphere that is much less hostile than its overlord’s. It is a wet world similar to Earth, but unlike our planet, it is awash in methane.