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 ...

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has successfully executed its daring dive, hurtling through the 1,500-mile-wide gap between Saturn and its rings.

Right until its final moments, the spacecraft continued to send insightful images of 'The Ringed Planet.' The mission's ...

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.

Cassini will be taking direct samples of ring particles, as well as samples of Saturn’s innermost radiation belts and upper atmosphere. A second dive between Saturn and its rings is scheduled ...

NASA's Cassini spacecraft made its first dive between Saturn and its rings early Wednesday, as the final act in a nearly 20-year mission. NASA/JPL-Caltech hide caption ...

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.

Measuring ring-material detected by Cassini falling into Saturn’s equator allowed astronomers to give the rings another 100 million years to live. This story has been updated to fix a typo.

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 ...

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 ...

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft will shift its orbit around Saturn on Saturday, preparing to dive between the planet and its many rings. After 13 years in orbit, Cassini is set to burn up in Saturn ...

During the final year of NASA’s Cassini mission before it completed a “death dive” into Saturn’s atmosphere in 2017, the spacecraft gathered as much data as possible about the planet’s ...