Illustration of Cassini diving between Saturn and its innermost rings as part of the mission's Grand Finale. The spacecraft will perform a series of 22 daring orbits passing through the yet ...

Since astronomer Galileo Galilei first noticed something odd about Saturn in 1610, the planet's picturesque rings have posed many fascinating puzzles. Over the past 13 years, the American-European ...

When the movie begins, Cassini was 45,000 miles above Saturn's polar clouds. By the time it ends, the spacecraft's altitude was down to 4,200 miles as it approached the plane of the rings.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured this series of 21 images from within the gap between Saturn and its rings. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute) ...

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has successfully executed its daring dive, hurtling through the 1,500-mile-wide gap between Saturn and its rings.

Before the spacecraft plunged into Saturn's atmosphere in 2017, Cassini repeatedly flew between the planet and its rings while collecting an abundance of data. Now, using that data, captured with ...

NASA's Cassini spacecraft orbited Saturn for more than 10 years, capturing images of its rings and moons in never-before-seen detail. Since at least 2019, posts on social media have shared a ...

Cassini offered an opportunity to put a definitive age on Saturn’s rings. The spacecraft first arrived at Saturn in 2004 and collected data until it purposefully crashed into the planet's atmosphere ...

Measuring ring-material detected by Cassini falling into Saturn’s equator allowed astronomers to give the rings another 100 million years to live. This story has been updated to fix a typo.

Illustration of Cassini diving between Saturn and its innermost rings as part of the mission's Grand Finale. The spacecraft will perform a series of 22 daring orbits passing through the yet ...

Cassini's data indicate that most of Saturn's rings are probably as old as the solar system itself — about 4.5 billion years. Earlier observations, during the Voyager flybys of 1980 and 1981 ...

During the final year of NASA’s Cassini mission before it completed a “death dive” into Saturn’s atmosphere in 2017, the spacecraft gathered as much data as possible about the planet’s ...