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Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second-largest planet in our solar system. Like fellow gas giant Jupiter, Saturn is a massive ball made mostly of hydrogen and helium. Saturn is not the only planet to have rings, but none are as spectacular or as complex as Saturn's.
By the time Cassini dove into Saturn at the end of its mission, it had observed the planet for less than half of a Saturn year. But it had also orbited the gas giant 294 times, forever changing our understanding of the Saturn system and yielding insight for understanding the entire solar system.
NASA’s real-time science encyclopedia of deep space exploration. Our scientists and far-ranging robots explore the wild frontiers of our solar system.
Because Enceladus reflects so much sunlight, the surface temperature is extremely cold, about minus 330 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 201 degrees Celsius). But it is not as cold and inactive a place as it appears.
The probe was about 9 feet wide (2.7 meters) and weighed roughly 700 pounds (318 kilograms). It was built like a shellfish: a hard shell protected its delicate interior from high temperatures during the a 2.25 hour descent through the atmosphere of Saturn's giant moon Titan.
Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun, and the second largest in the solar system. It’s surrounded by beautiful rings.
By analyzing an object’s light with a spectrometer, scientists can determine its temperature and some of the materials it’s made of. When pointed at Saturn’s atmosphere, for example, a spectrometer would reveal a series of bright lines indicating that the spectrometer observed methane gas.
This sequence of maps shows varying surface temperatures on Saturn's moon Titan at two-year intervals, from 2004 to 2016. The measurements were made by the Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) instrument on NASA's Cassini spacecraft.
The surface of Titan is one of the most Earthlike places in the solar system, albeit at vastly colder temperatures and with different chemistry. Here it is so cold (-290 degrees Fahrenheit or -179 degrees Celsius) that water ice plays the role of rock.
Scientists discovered evidence of Enceladus’ internal ocean from gravity measurements based on the Doppler effect and the magnitude of the moon’s very slight wobble as it orbits Saturn. The data was consistent with the existence of a large global ocean inside the moon.