Cassini Scientists’ Favourite Photos
The story of Cassini–Huygens, a joint project from the American, European and Italian space agencies, spans almost 35 years from its inception. Launched in 1997, it spent the last 13 years in orbit around Saturn observing the giant planet, its extensive ring system and its many moons for almost half a Kronian year, from equinox to equinox, before its Final Plunge into the atmosphere of Saturn at 13:04 UTC on 15 September 2017.
This collection is a tribute to Cassini made by the very scientists who worked with the spacecraft's numerous instruments. We asked twelve of them (and an editor with a Cassini past) to select their favourite amongst the huge database of images obtained by Cassini and to write a short accompanying piece. The articles are classified in the various tags according to theme. It is impossible to do justice to Cassini's tremendous output with a dozen or so photos, but they give a nice comprehensive overview, showing examples from the various bodies of the Kronian system and environments, from rocky moons to magnetospheres.
This collection is complemented by some of the Cassini-related papers we have published in the first nine months of Nature Astronomy.
