When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Since astronomer Galileo Galilei first noticed something odd about Saturn in 1610, the ...

A movie sequence of images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows Saturn's ring system from the space between the rings and the planet. A movie sequence of images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft ...

Cassini’s long mission made it possible to watch changes in Saturn’s dynamic ring system. Once about every 15 years, the Sun shines on the edge of the ring plane and northern and southern ...

Currently, there are no plans to revisit the Saturn system. This image was ... Institute This wide-angle image of the rings of Saturn was taken during Cassini’s descent, when it was still ...

As it whizzed through the gap between Saturn and its rings, Cassini was traveling at around ... the last couple of hundred million years—in a system that had been presumably quite stable for ...

Cassini was the first dedicated spacecraft to look at Saturn and its system. It was named for Giovanni ... thick atmosphere), and spotting several rings of Saturn that were not visible with ...

Over 13 years, Cassini’s bucketlike Cosmic Dust Analyzer was able to scoop up 163 grains of dust that originated from beyond the Saturn system as they whirled around the gas giant. The rings ...

Cassini found that the rings, which average just 10 meters thick ... This would enable observation of seasonal phenomena in the Saturn system -- such as anticipated increased ring spoke activity ...

Robert Hooke noticed shadows on the rings. By 1675, Giovanni Cassini had figured ... have formed the ring system we see today. This scenario could also explain how Saturn acquired its large ...

Yet, when the Cassini probe arrived to study ... Although the other giant planets in the Solar System have rings, too, they ...

Saturn's famous rings are about to disappear ... will take another 300 million years until the entire ring system is gone. But the Cassini spacecraft, which spent years probing the planet ...