
This image shows Cassini’s last two orbital phases. The ring-grazing orbits are shown in gray (far left), while the Grand Finale orbits — during which Cassini’s collected unprecedented measurements of Saturn’s ionosphere — are shown in blue. The orange line shows Cassini’s final plunge into Saturn on September 15, 2017. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
In April of this year, NASA nudged the Cassini spacecraft into an orbit that took it through a narrow gap between Saturn’s innermost ring (the D-ring) and the gas giant itself. Over the next few months, Cassini skimmed the upper atmosphere of the ringed planet nearly two dozen times.