Cassini to Saturn

A spacecraft that Cassini entered orbit around Saturn in the summer of 2004, and has transmitted tens of thousands of images of the planet and its rings and moons. On January 14, 2005, a second part of the mission, the Huygens probe, parachuted to a soft landing on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. Its images showed a landscape carved by flowing liquid. Cassini’s instruments have peered through Titan’s atmospheric haze to discover lakes of liquid methane and ethane, extensive river networks, ice volcanoes, and giant dune systems on Titan’s surface. Cassini is scheduled to continue its reconnaissance of the Saturn system until 2017.