Congratulations, Cassini!

The most amazing planetary explorer, the Cassini spacecraft, is celebrating a decade in orbit around Saturn today! Cassini has taken over 300,000 images of Saturn and its rings and moons, and advanced our understanding of the solar system by leaps and bounds. 

Image credit: NASA/JPL

Cassini was launched in 1997, and took a looping journey through the solar system before entering orbit around Saturn in 2004. Along the way, it took beautiful pictures of Jupiter. All of the photos below can be found at the wonderful ciclops.org site, which catalogs all of the official Cassini images, and are credited to NASA/JPL.

Cassini has taken so many beautiful pictures of Saturn that it is hard to pick the best ones! Here are some of my favorites:

A storm in Saturn's atmosphere, that eventually wrapped around the entire planet.

Cassini discovered Saturn's moon Daphnis, which maintains the Keeler Gap in the rings.

The vertical structures, miles tall, in Cassini's rings can only be seen at the Saturn equinox.

Notice the lovely blue hues in the Northern winter, slightly obscured by the shadows cast by the rings, seen edge on here. Enceladus is visible as a tiny speck.

64 Cassini images were complied for Paul McCartney's 64th birthday by Carolyn Porco, planetary scientist who leads the Cassini imaging team (and Beatles fan).

I didn't even include any images of Saturn's moons! I highly encourage you to visit the ciclops site and browse through Cassini's images, and also watch this TED talk by Carolyn Porco, the lead scientist in Cassini's imaging team. Congratulations, Cassini! Keep up the amazing work!