Saturn: Facts about the ringed planet
helped astronomers discover that the planet's rings are made up of thinner ringlets. The craft also sent back data that led to the discovery of three of Saturn’s moons., a Saturn orbiter, was the largest interplanetary spacecraft ever built. The two-story-tall probe weighed 6 tons . It helped identify plumes on the icy moon Enceladus, and carried the Huygens probe, which plunged through Titan's atmosphere to successfully land on its surface.
After a decade of observation, Cassini returned incredible data about the Ringed Planet and its moons, as well as a photo re-creating the original , which captures Earth from behind Saturn, in 2013. The mission concluded in September 2017 when Cassini, low on fuel, was deliberately crashed into Saturn to avoid the slight chance of the craft crashing into and contaminating a habitable moon.
While there are no future missions planned for Saturn, scientists have proposed missions to probe the icy moon Enceladus or Titan. In 2019, NASA announced there plans to launch their rotorcraft-lander Dragonfly in 2026 and which will arrive on Titan in 2034. Dragonfly will search for the chemical building block for life on Titan using its many onboard instruments, including a mass spectrometer.
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