What Did Cassini See During Its Historic Mission To Saturn? 

The Cassini spacecraft orbited Saturn for more than a decade, giving us unprecedented insights into the planet’s inner and outer workings. It was primarily a NASA mission, although it also included a craft called Huygens, built by the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency, that landed on the surface of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.

The mission launched in 1997, flying past Venus and Jupiter on its way to Saturn. It arrived in orbit in 2004, and thanks to three mission extensions it spent 13 years revolutionizing our understanding of the system. It took more than 450,000 images, discovered six named moons, and taught us about not only the Saturn system but the possibilities for planets and moons everywhere.

At the end of its mission, Cassini executed a maneuver called the “Grand Finale.” It circled closer and closer to Saturn’s cloud tops, between the planet and the rings. Then, on September 15, 2017, it plunged into the planet’s atmosphere — this was the only way to ensure that it would never smash into any of Saturn’s moons and contaminate them with any Earth microbes that managed to cling on to it. It continued transmitting data for 30 seconds longer than expected, but eventually, it burned up.

Cassini provided a wealth of data on Saturn, enough for researchers to analyze for decades to come. It measured the rotation rate of the planet — which proved to be more complicated than anyone had suspected — using several different mechanisms, as well as the difference between the overall rotation and atmospheric motion.

That atmospheric motion included enormous storms and jet streams that we’d never seen up close before, in addition to colossal hurricanes at the planet’s poles. The craft also found lightning, taking the first videos of lightning on any planet beyond Earth. It also greatly deepened our understanding of the atmospheric makeup of the planet.

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