Unlikely Photographers
A curated digital exhibition of NASA’s most courageous and unlikely of photographers.
The Mission
Cassini was one of the most ambitious efforts ever mounted in planetary exploration. A joint endeavor of NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency) and the Italian space agency (ASI), Cassini was a sophisticated robotic spacecraft sent to study Saturn and its complex system of rings and moons in unprecedented detail.
Cassini carried a probe called Huygens to the Saturn system. The probe, which was built by ESA, parachuted to the surface of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, in January 2005—the most distant landing to date in our solar system. Huygens returned spectacular images and other science results during a two-and-a-half-hour descent through Titan’s hazy atmosphere, before coming to rest amid rounded cobbles of ice on a floodplain damp with liquid methane.
Cassini completed its initial four-year mission in June 2008 and earned two mission extensions that enabled the team to delve even deeper into Saturn’s mysteries. Key discoveries during its 13 years at Saturn included a global ocean with strong indications of hydrothermal activity within Enceladus, and liquid methane seas on Titan. The mission ended on Sept. 15, 2018.
The Mission
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter blasted off from Cape Canaveral in 2005, on a search for evidence that water persisted on the surface of Mars for a long periods of time. While other Mars missions have shown that water flowed across the surface in Mars' history, it remains a mystery whether water was ever around long enough to provide a habitat for life.
