Cassini has been orbiting Saturn for the past 13 years or just shy of a full Saturnian year (29 Earth years).NASA/JPL
A series of images captured during a three-hour flyby were used to create this backlit panoramic view.NASA/JPL
Mimas streaks across the vivid blues of the ringed planet's northern latitudes.NASA/JPL
A wider glimpse of these blue colorations in the "cloud free" northern hemisphere.NASA/JPL
Rhea, Saturn's second-largest moon, is tidally locked, this mean that one particular side is always facing the planet.NASA/JPL
Dione, Saturn's third-largest moon, orbits roughly 234,500 miles above the planet. That is similar to the distance between the Earth and our moon.NASA/JPL
Saturn's fourth-largest moon, Dione, drifting along the ring plane.NASA/JPL
Saturn has seven total "ring groups" and these groups are comprised of thousands of smaller rings. The exact total number of rings is still currently unknown.NASA/JPL
Saturn's north pole contains a six-sided jet stream known as "the hexagon." This formation is comprised of many smaller vortices and some of these formations span more than 2,000 miles.NASA/JPL
This is a false-color image of one of these Saturnian vortices adrift in "the hexagon." NASA has estimated that wind speeds inside of this massive storm could reach more than 300 miles per hour.NASA/JPL
Saturn's moons Janus and Epimetheus have an almost identical orbit and swap places once every four years. As these moons trade places, the nearby ring system responds to this gravitational protuberance, creating a new "crest" along the wave system.NASA/JPL
Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, dwarfs three other smaller satellites in this image from 2011. Titan is about the size of the planet Mercury and is the only moon in our solar system known to have an atmosphere. The massive moon will give the Cassini probe the so-called "goodbye kiss" -- a gravitational nudge that will send the spacecraft on its final dive towards Saturn.NASA/JPL
In the right portion of the shot, you can see a hazy debris field inside the planet's F ring, which is normally the result of a collision.
This disruption was likely caused by Saturn's small moon Pandora, seen in the bottom-right portion of the photograph. However, the impingement could also have been the result of an interaction between other objects within the ring.NASA/JPL
Five of Saturn's moons. (From right to left: Rhea, Mimas, Enceladus, Pandora, and Janus.)NASA/JPL
Saturn's geologically active moon, Enceladus.NASA/JPL
Cassini captured a glimpse of Saturn's plume-spewing moon, Enceladus, on April 13, 2017. The craft has traveled through these dense streams on numerous occasions and data from one such flyby revealed the existence of molecular hydrogen, making the moon a potential candidate for sustaining life.NASA/JPL
The massive impact crater on Saturn's moon Tethys is nearly 280 miles wide. The peak at the center is almost 3.5-miles high, making it about as tall as Mount Everest.NASA/JPL
Saturn's heavily cratered moon Prometheus is roughly 53 miles across.NASA/JPL
Nearly 870 million miles away, Cassini turned its instruments toward Earth, snapping this gorgeous photo of our planet through Saturn's rings.NASA/JPL
The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft has spent nearly two decades in space collecting invaluable data and unprecedented close-ups of the Saturnian system. The craft has logged nearly 5 billion miles on its cosmic odometer, and the library of Cassini images contains more than 400,000 images and counting.
Cassini sports 18 unique scientific instruments and is 12,593 pounds making it one of the largest and heaviest space probes ever constructed.
From the drawing board onward, the Cassini mission was set to be one of the most ambitious unmanned missions ever launched into the cosmos. Tricked out with 18 unique scientific instruments, the spacecraft hit the launchpad at a not-so-svelte 12,593 pounds, making Cassini one of the heaviest and largest interplanetary probes ever constructed. In fact, only the two interplanetary spacecraft (Phobos 1 and Phobos 2) launched by the Soviet Union were more massive.
Once hurled into the solar system, Cassini spent the next seven years braving the unforgiving vacuum of space before even reaching Saturn. A system glitch, meteorite, or haphazard collision with any number of orbiting hunks of space junk could’ve killed this $3 billion dollar mission before it even started. Fortunately, this was not Cassini’s fate, and on July 1, 2004, the probe finally arrived at its destination. The spacecraft would spend the next 13 years investigating the enigmatic gas giant and relaying data back to us earthlings nearly 900 million miles away.
After successfully executing more than 2.5 million commands including 162 targeted flybys of Saturn’s moons, Cassini boasts a rather lengthy list of accomplishments. Outside of discovering previously unknown moons (no big deal) and observing massive hurricanes at both Saturnian poles, the craft also detected the elements necessary to potentially host living organisms on the ice-spewing satellite, Enceladus.
NASA illustration of Cassini on final dive towards Saturn.NASA/JPL
Unfortunately, in the cosmic scheme of things, nothing lasts forever, and even the stalwart Cassini is not exempt from the inevitable. Protecting these aforementioned potentially life-sustaining “ocean worlds” is the central purpose of the so-called Grand Finale that will culminate with a final “suicide dive” into Saturn’s tumultuous atmosphere. This subsequent series of dives toward the planet will prevent Cassini from possibly contaminating one of these potentially life-sustaining moons with sturdy microbes that may have survived the journey from Earth.
The craft began the first of these plunges in August and earlier this week Cassini received its “goodbye kiss” from Titan, a final flyby and consequential gravitational nudge toward Saturn. The steadfast craft is expected to crash into the planet’s atmosphere on September 15, 2017, transmitting data to the bitter end.
Of the more than nearly half a million images the probe has snapped during its 20 years adrift in the solar system, these are 25 of our favorite. Godspeed, Cassini.
If you’re craving more stunning glimpses of our celestial neighbors and beyond, we’ve also curated a gallery of the best photos of outer space.
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NASA says it’s on track for the late-August maiden launch of its next-generation lunar rocket and spacecraft for the Artemis I mission.
At a special briefing on Wednesday, August 3, officials at the space agency said final preparatory work on its rocket and spacecraft was going well. It means that barring any last-minute hiccups, the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft will be rolled out to the launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on August 11 for an August 29 liftoff.
6 awesome Earth images captured from the ISS in July
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While its primary function is as a space-based laboratory for performing science experiments in microgravity conditions, the orbital outpost also allows astronauts to conduct Earth observation studies as well as the chance to capture gorgeous images of our amazing planet.
