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.
Matthew Hedman has written about periodic brightness variations in the rings visible in the high-resolution images only when the Sun is edge-on — actual ripples generated by some impact event that happened in the 1980s and still reverberating. Matthew Hedman is assistant professor at the University of Idaho (USA). His expertise focuses on planetary rings, and he worked on Cassini data from the VIMS spectrometer and the Narrow Angle Camera of the ISS imaging system.
Linda Spilker selected an unique view of the rings, possible only every 15 years at equinoxes when the Sun illuminates the rings edge-on (like the image above), which allowed the observation of the shadows of the bigger ring particles on the plane of the rings. Linda Spilker works at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena (USA) and is Project Scientist for the Cassini mission.
