Backstage Pass to Iapetus

This mosaic, made from radar images obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, shows mountainous terrain on Saturn's moon Titan in the moon's northern hemisphere, north of the Aaru region. The annotate...

+ Unlabeled version Scientists have discovered a wave pattern, or oscillation, in Saturn's atmosphere only visible from Earth every 15 years. The pattern ripples back and forth like a wave withi...

This graphic illustrates Cassini's trajectory, or flight path, during the final two phases of its mission. The 20 Ring-Grazing Orbits are shown in gray; the 22 Grand Finale Orbits are shown in blue...

+ View Related Story At the end of the formation of Saturn's satellites, a Titan-sized satellite spirals inward towards the planet due to interaction with the primordial circumplanetary gas disk...

+ View Unannotated Version The dark hot spot in this false-color image from NASA's Cassini spacecraft is a window deep into Jupiter's atmosphere. All around it are layers of higher clouds, with ...

This free NASA e-Book celebrates Saturn as seen through the eyes of the Cassini spacecraft. 

Saturn's clouds and hazes at three different levels in the atmosphere are depicted in the image on the right, as observed by the visual infrared mapping spectrometer on the Cassini spacecraft. In ...

This artist's concept shows the rough sizes of the planets relative to each other. Correct distances are not shown. 

This set of enhanced-color maps made from data obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft show Saturn's moons Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione and Rhea. The global maps show the colorful splotches and ba...

Presented here is a complete set of cartographic map sheets from a high-resolution Enceladus atlas, a project of the Cassini Imaging Team. The map sheets form a 15-quadrangle series covering the...

This figure illustrates the unexpected and bizarre pattern of daytime temperatures found on Saturn's small inner moon Mimas (396 kilometers, or 246 miles, in diameter). 

+ Un-annotated version The constant change in Saturn’s wavy, wiggly F ring is on display in this set of images obtained by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. The images show a view looking directly down o...

We always see the same side of the moon, because as the moon revolves around the Earth, the moon rotates so that the same side is always facing the Earth. But the moon still looks a little differen...

This synthetic aperture radar image was obtained by the Cassini spacecraft on its recent pass by Titan's south pole on Dec. 20, 2007. This portion of the (T39) swath is of the region extending f...

+ Higher Resolution This graphic illustrates the Radio Science Occultation Experiment conducted on Friday May 10, 2013. Details and description of terms: Dots are spaced at 15-minute (15 m) ...

This is an artist concept of a close-up view of Saturn's ring particles. The planet Saturn is seen in the background (yellow and brown). The particles (blue) are composed mostly of ice, but are not...

Radio waves produced near the poles of Saturn have been monitored by Cassini's Radio and Plasma Wave Science instrument (RPWS) since 2003. A team of European scientists have analysed several years ...

Learning what Jupiter is made of and how it works will tell us more about the rest of the solar system and our own planet, Earth.

MOPITT's monthly average of global concentrations of tropospheric carbon monoxide at an altitude of about 12,000 feet, in April 2000 (left) and April 2014.

This is a computer-rendered image of Cassini during the Saturn Orbit Insertion (SOI) maneuver, just after the main engine has begun firing. The spacecraft is moving out of the plane of the page and...

This graphic plots the source locations of the geysers scientists have located on Enceladus' south polar terrain. 

This graphic shows the trajectories for the Cassini spacecraft during its flybys of the icy moon Enceladus on Oct. 9 and 31, 2008. The Oct. 9 flyby is the closest flyby yet of any moon of Saturn...

Twenty-eight years before Cassini-Huygens arrived at Saturn, artist Ken Hodges painted this vision of a possible mission to explore Saturn and the giant moon Titan for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laborat...

NASA's Cassini mission is closing one chapter of its journey at Saturn and embarking on a new one with a two-year mission that will address new questions and bring it closer to two of its most intr...

+ Brightening Adiri -- Unannotated Images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft show changes caused by methane rain in the bright Adiri region near the equator of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. Altho...