Inspiration

This still is from a short computer-animated film that highlights Cassini's accomplishments and Saturn and reveals the science-packed final orbits between April and September 2017.

This mosaic of images from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft shows three fan-like structures in Saturn's tenuous F ring. Such "fans" suggest the existence of additional objects in the F ring. From right t...

A colorful summary of Cassini's 13 years orbiting Saturn.

These flags illustrate the international scope of the Cassini program. Although its primary sponsors are NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Italian Space Agency (ASI), the Cassini team ...

+ View related feature story + View unlabeled image Scientists with NASA's Cassini mission have spotted two features shaped like the 1980s video game icon "Pac-Man" on moons of Saturn. One wa...

Cassini mission planners created this animation to showcase Cassini's final 22 orbits - the mission's Grand Finale.

This graphic, constructed from data obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, shows the percentage of cloud coverage across the surface of Saturn's moon Titan. The color scale from black to yellow sig...

For Cassini's next flyby of Titan on May 12, 2007, the radar instrument was originally pointing north of where it is now pointed. Due to the discovery of probable large seas on Titan, Cassini's qui...

Artist’s version of a star chart, complete with arrows to help locate Saturn. Credit: NASA/JPL

A selection of graphics celebrating America's birthday over the years.

This still is from a short computer-animated film that highlights Cassini's accomplishments and Saturn and reveals the science-packed final orbits between April and September 2017.

This plot shows results from Cassini's ion neutral mass spectrometer and cosmic dust analyzer, obtained during the spacecraft's close approach to Enceladus on July 14, 2005.

Saturn reaches opposition -- the closest it comes to Earth -- on Jan. 27, 2006. On this date, golden Saturn rises in the east just as the sun sets in the west. It will be visible all night long. A...

This still is from a short computer-animated film that highlights Cassini's accomplishments and Saturn and reveals the science-packed final orbits between April and September 2017.

The Mariner Mark II spacecraft that was designed to handle both the CRAF, Comet Rendezvous Asteroid Flyby mission, and the Cassini mission.

New data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft suggest that the shape of our solar system moving through the local Milky Way galaxy looks like a bubble.

This graphic illustrates Cassini's trajectory, or flight path, during the final two phases of its mission. The view is toward Saturn as seen from Earth. The 20 Ring-Grazing Orbits are shown in gray...

It was a busy decade for Cassini. Here is the breakdown.

Diagram of the Cassini spacecraft and Huygens probe.

MLS measures lower stratospheric temperature and concentrations of H2O, O3, ClO, BrO, HCl, OH, HO2, HNO3, HCN and N2O, for their effects on (and diagnoses of) ozone depletion, transformations of gr...

The number of water particles in Enceladus' plume peaked over the area highlighted by the circle in this image of Enceladus, which is overlain by data from Cassini's Ion and Neutral Mass Spectromet...

While the curtain-like auroras we see at Earth are green at the bottom and red at the top, NASA's Cassini spacecraft has shown us similar curtain-like auroras at Saturn that are red at the bottom a...

This colorized mosaic from NASA's Cassini mission shows the most complete view yet of Titan's northern land of lakes and seas. Saturn's moon Titan is the only world in our solar system other than E...

This illustration shows Cassini above Saturn's northern hemisphere prior to making one of its Grand Finale dives.

This infrared projection map of Titan was composed from images taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, visual and infrared mapping spectrometer. The location of two regions that changed in brightness a...