Ten Years at Saturn: Cassini’s 10 Greatest Pictures
By Phil Plait

On July 1, 2004 at 12:12 a.m. ET—10 years ago—the main engine on board the Cassini space probe cut off. When the burn was over, Cassini had achieved a milestone in human history: It became the first spacecraft to enter Saturn orbit.

I remember staying up late that night, hunched over my computer, listening to the NASA and JPL feed, waiting almost literally on the edge of my seat for the news that the Saturn Orbital Insertion was complete. I remember my daughter, then just 8 years old, asking me what was going on, and I showed her some pictures of the spacecraft and what Saturn looked like as it approached.

That was a decade ago. My daughter enters college this fall, and a billion kilometers away Cassini still orbits the giant ringed planet, still points its cameras where we tell it, and still returns devastatingly gorgeous pictures to astronomers back on Earth. To celebrate this milestone I picked my ten favorite images from Cassini, one for each year our robotic proxy has examined Saturn. They will surely show you why Cassini has had such a profound impact on the public, because each is so amazing and so beautiful it would make any terrestrial artist jealous.

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These close views represent the opening of an entirely new window onto Saturn’s rings, and over the next few months we look forward to even more exciting data as we train our cameras on other parts of the rings closer to the planet.
- Matthew Tiscareno, Cassini Scientist

April 11, 2017
Throughout Cassini's nearly 20-year mission, the flight team on Earth has transmitted between four and 10 weeks of commands to the spacecraft at a time. This transmission on April 11, 2017, was special. The team sent one of the final command sequences, navigating Cassini toward and eventually through the gap between Saturn's innermost ring and the planet itself. These orbits are known as Cassini's Grand Finale, the series of 22 dives through the gap, dipping into Saturn's atmosphere and occasionally through the D ring.
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