New Delhi: Even after its end, NASA's Cassini is still providing information on the planet it studied for 13 years.
On Monday, NASA released an image of Saturn captured by Cassini, with the iconic rings gracefully winding their way around the planet to pass beyond the horizon.
A tiny Pandora – Saturn's moon – barely the size of a speck can also be seen orbiting just beyond the F ring.
Also in this image is the gap between Saturn’s cloud tops and its innermost D ring through which Cassini would pass 22 times before ending its mission in spectacular fashion.
Scientists scoured images of this region, particularly those taken at the high phase (spacecraft-ring-Sun) angles, looking for material that might pose a hazard to the spacecraft.
According to NASA, this view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 19 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in green light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Aug. 12, 2017. Pandora was brightened by a factor of 2 to increase its visibility.
The Cassini mission came to an end last month – September 15 – after it performed a death plunge into the planet's atmosphere.
The mission was launched 20 years ago in August 1997.
