Cassini tickles Saturn's rings ahead of final death plunge

[Robert]

More cool space science:

The Cassini space probe has begun a series of orbits designed to swing it through the edges of Saturn's ring system.

The probe, which has been orbiting the gas giant since 2004, fired a six-second burst of its rocket motor at 0409 PT (1209 UTC) to put it into a swooping orbit 57,000 miles (91,000 kilometers) over the gas giant. That diversion sent it through a small dusty outer ring of the planet and within 6,800 miles (11,000 kilometers) of the outer F ring system.

"It's taken years of planning, but now that we're finally here, the whole Cassini team is excited to begin studying the data that come from these ring-grazing orbits," said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). "This is a remarkable time in what's already been a thrilling journey."

If any of you have yet to view Saturn through a telescope, I urge you to do so at your earliest convenience. If you're lucky enough to catch it when the shadows show the planet in 3D-glory against the rings, it's a magical sight.

 

[Robert]

From high above Saturn, Cassini spies an odd, hexagon-shaped storm

The end is nigh for Cassini, the venerable probe that NASA launched to Saturn way back in 1997. The probe has dazzled us with views of the diverse planetary system since 2004. Now engineers want to send the aging spacecraft out with style, and as part of its final maneuvers Cassini will skim through Saturn's iconic ring system 20 times during the coming months before the mission's end on September 15, 2017.

Cassini performed the first of these maneuvers last weekend. As part of this re-positioning to a new flight path, Cassini has captured new photos of Saturn's northern hemisphere and its distinctive, hexagon-shaped storm. These images were taken with the spacecraft's wide-angle camera on December 2, just before the first graze of Saturn's rings, from a distance of about 640,000km.

 

[Robert]

False colour image is pretty groovy too: