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.
Bonnie Buratti selected a Cassini image of the irregular and chaotically rotating moon Hyperion, which is peppered with deep craters that confer it a peculiar spongy structure. Bonnie Buratti is a senior scientist and Supervisor for the asteroids, comets and satellites group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena (USA). She studies surface composition and charateristics of small bodies (and Pluto) and within Cassini she is an investigation scientist (the VIMS instrument) and one of the science integration engineers.
Carl Murray chose a recent image of the small moon Pan (14 km radius), whose most characteristic feature is the growth of material at the equator, made by material ejected by impacts with ring particles and then reaccreted at the equator. Carl Murray is a professor at Queen Mary University in London (UK) and he is a member of the Cassini imaging system (ISS), studying the dynamical properties of Saturn's ring and related moonlets.
