These 11 Pictures of Saturn Will Stun You, Even Now

In one of the most charming moments in astronomy, Galileo, who discovered Saturn’s rings in 1610, took them to be handles. A portable planet.

Today, in one of the most thrilling moments—and, for the mission’s scientists and engineers, perhaps the saddest—the orbiter Cassini-Huygens plunged toward Saturn at nearly 80,000 miles an hour to incinerate itself. “That would be the end of the spacecraft,” a voice announced at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in California, as the team lost Cassini’s signal.