Cassini Sends First Images Of Saturn's Atmosphere; Man Achieves Yet Another Feat

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has recently sent its first views of Saturn's atmosphere to Earth, the space agency said on Wednesday (December 7). The latest images have shown scenes from a high altitude of the ringed planet's northern hemisphere, including its hexagon-shaped jet stream, the space agency said.

Cassini started its new mission termed Ring-Grazing Orbits on November 30. Each of the weeklong orbits, numbering 20, carries the craft above Saturn's northern hemisphere before sending it past the outer edges of the planet's rings, NASA said, adding that the latest images were acquired on December 2 and 3. The next set of images are expected to be some of the closest-ever views of the outer rings.

"This is it, the beginning of the end of our historic exploration of Saturn," Carolyn Porco, lead of the Cassini imaging team at Space Science Institute, Colorado, said.

The ring-grazing orbits are expected to continue till April 22 when the final close flyby of Titan, Saturn's moon, will reshape the spacecraft's flight path. Thereafter, the Cassini will begin its final journey which will see it leaping over the rings and making the first of the 22 plunges through the gap between the planet and its innermost ring.

Our @CassiniSaturn spacecraft beams back first views of Saturn’s atmosphere from its new ring-grazing orbits: https://t.co/YEl6bk315J pic.twitter.com/paB010Hiz1

— NASA (@NASA) December 7, 2016

In September, the scheduled mission of Cassini, which was launched in 1997, will see a final dive into the planet's atmosphere.

Like NASA's other spacecraft that are located beyond the Earth's orbit, Cassini would also be unable to share its fascinating discoveries with us without the Deep Space Network -- a global collection of radio antennas that interact with NASA's spacecraft that roam around the solar system for exploring, another NASA report said.

Engineers have always tried to make light and compact spacecraft but the necessity of a whole lot of things like power supply equipment, science instruments, communications system, etc. make them what Dave Doody, leader of the Cassini mission's real-time operations team described as "little cities of engineering, all in a tiny little package".