A Saturn Spectacular, With Gravity’s Help

SEVEN MORE YEARS Brent Buffington, from left, David Seal and John C. Smith arranged models of Jupiter and Saturn in a viewing room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, Calif. Robert Benson for The New York Times

From The New York Times:

When it comes to voyages of discovery, NASA’s venerable Cassini mission is about as good as it gets.

In six years of cruising around the planet Saturn and its neighborhood, the Cassini spacecraft has discovered two new Saturn rings, a bunch of new moons and a whole new class of moonlets. It encountered liquid lakes on the moon Titan, water ice and a particle plume on the moon Enceladus, ridges and ripples on the rings, and cyclones at Saturn’s poles. Cassini also released a European space probe that landed on Titan. And Cassini has sent back enough data to produce more than 1,400 scientific papers — at last count.

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