What Cassini Saw The Spacecraft That Fell in Love With Saturn | A 20-Year Voyage in Real NASA Images

In 1997, a spacecraft two storeys tall left Earth on a seven-year journey to Saturn. It stayed for thirteen years, and changed everything we thought we knew about the outer solar system. This short film tells the story of Cassini–Huygens using real images returned by the spacecraft, plus original motion graphics and an original ambient score. It follows Cassini from the clean room to the launch pad, along its looping gravity-assist path past Venus, Earth and Jupiter, and on to its triumphant arrival at Saturn in July 2004. From there it covers the discoveries: the Huygens landing on Titan, the ice geysers of Enceladus, the north polar hexagon, and the day Cassini turned back to photograph Earth from nearly a billion miles away. It ends with the Grand Finale. Cassini made 22 daring dives through the gap between Saturn and its rings before a final plunge into the planet on 15 September 2017. Its last signal reached Earth at 4:55 a.m. PDT. 📊 CASSINI BY THE NUMBERS 294 orbits of Saturn 162 targeted moon flybys 453,048 images returned 635 GB of science data 4.9 billion miles travelled 3,948 scientific papers published 27 nations involved 📸 IMAGE CREDITS Images courtesy of NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute. Huygens surface image: ESA / NASA / JPL / University of Arizona. Launch and assembly photos: NASA / KSC. Mission control photos: NASA. The trajectory and Grand Finale graphics are illustrative and not to scale. Use of NASA imagery does not imply endorsement by NASA. 🎵 MUSIC Original ambient score composed for this film. If you enjoyed this, subscribe for more space history and imagery, and let us know in the comments which Cassini discovery amazes you most. #Cassini #Saturn #NASA #Space #Astronomy #Titan #Enceladus #SpaceExploration