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 20 ring-grazing revolutions are just the opening act to the Grand Finale orbits, 22 passes starting in April that will take the spacecraft to just 1,012 miles above the planet’s ...

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.

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 ...

Cassini will make one last pass of this moon in April 2017 to permanently change its orbit. Once this happens, Cassini will fly through the narrow gap between the rings and Saturn.

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) ...

Cassini looks back at Saturn after its second pass through the gap between the planet and its rings. May 2 Rhea Saturn’s moon Rhea is one of the most heavily cratered objects in the solar system.

Figuring out the day length of Earth is more complicated than you might imagine. While on average a day is 24 hours long, ...

NASA's Cassini spacecraft re-established contact with ground controllers shortly before 3 a.m. ET after passing through the gap between Saturn and the planet's rings.

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 ...