It is not a real news that the glorious Cassini’s mission will come to an end in April 2017, when the spaceship will plunge into Saturn for what has been named “Gran Finale”. More precisely, starting from Nov. 30, 2016, Cassini will climb above Saturn’s north pole, then drop to a point just outside the narrow F ring (the edge of the main rings), completing 22 orbits (each taking six days to complete). After that, on April 22, 2017, Cassini will first leap over the rings to begin its final series of dives between the planet and the inner edge of the rings, and then will plunge into the upper atmosphere of the planet, where it will burn up like a meteor.
Exciting, isn’t it?
In the meantime, Cassini keeps making discoveries and sending data, like the usual amazing imagery from Saturn and its court. In this case, of its crisscrossed rings. Yes, crisscrossed, or so they look like. The press release at the NASA’s page, gives us more information.
“At first glance, Saturn’s rings appear to be intersecting themselves in an impossible way. In actuality, this view from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft shows the rings in front of the planet, upon which the shadow of the rings is cast. And because rings like the A ring and Cassini Division, which appear in the foreground, are not entirely opaque, the disk of Saturn and those ring shadows can be seen directly through the rings themselves.
Saturn’s rings have complex and detailed structures, many of which can be seen here. In some cases, the reasons for the gaps and ringlets are known; for example, Pan (17 miles or 28 kilometres across) — seen here near image centre — keeps open the Encke gap. But in other cases, the origins and natures of gaps and ringlets are still poorly understood.”
This stunning image shows their sunlit side from 14 degrees above the plane where all rings lie, from a distance of about 1.2 million miles (1.9 million kilometres) from the moonlet Pan.
This is the position of Cassini today, in case you’re curious:
(You can track it at any moment, should you want to).
You can follow update and the rest of the mission in the official Cassini’s website: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/timeline/index.html
Instead, for more great images from Cassini, the imagery homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
Finally, in case you want to know more about the Gran Finale and the 22 orbits, this is a video you may want to watch: