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Saturn's icy moon Mimas is dwarfed by the planet's enormous rings.
NASA’s spacecraft tasked with skimming the rings of Saturn has beamed back its first up-close images offering an unprecedented view of the planet’s atmosphere.
The pictures are the first images captured by the Cassini spacecraft since beginning the latest phase of its mission before it eventually crash-lands in a suicide dive into the planet’s atmosphere designed to collect and send back crucial data about the atmosphere’s composition before the signal is lost.
Last week Cassini got a gravitational assist from Saturn’s big moon Titan which put the spacecraft on course to graze Saturn’s main outer rings over the next five months.
The new images beamed back to researchers on the ground show glimpses from high above Saturn’s northern hemisphere, including the planet’s intriguing hexagon-shaped jet stream that we recently discovered changes colours with the season.
Launched nearly 20 years ago, Cassini will swoop down through the outer edge of rings every seven days. The spacecraft should make 20 dives through April, observing some of Saturn’s many mini moons and even sampling ring particles and gases.
“This is it, the beginning of the end of our historic exploration of Saturn. Let these images — and those to come — remind you that we’ve lived a bold and daring adventure around the solar system’s most magnificent planet,†said Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team lead at Space Science Institute in Colorado.
This collage of images from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft shows Saturn’s northern hemisphere and rings as viewed with two different spectral filters. Picture: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science InstituteSource:Supplied
Each filter is sensitive to different wavelengths of light and reveals clouds and hazes at different altitudes. Picture: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science InstituteSource:Supplied
Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second-largest in the Solar System, behind Jupiter.
Like Jupiter, Saturn is a giant gas planet and is composed of similar gases including hydrogen, helium and methane.
Cassini’s sophisticated imaging cameras captured the above photos on December 2 and December 3, about two days before the first ring-grazing approach to the planet, NASA said.
The spacecraft which will do 20 ring-grazing orbits before April, will continue to capture images from the closest approach, including some of the closest-ever views of the outer rings and small moons that orbit the region.
In September Cassini will carry out its final act by plunging into Saturn’s atmosphere and will hopefully send back important data to NASA scientists before being swallowed up by the harsh celestial environment.
The suicide plunge will provide the final insight from a mission that has made numerous dramatic discoveries, including a global ocean with indications of hydrothermal activity within the moon Enceladus, and liquid methane seas on another moon, Titan.