[Wednesday, December 01, 2004] Cassini pierced the ring plane and rounded Saturn on Oct. 27, 2004, capturing this view of the dark portion of the rings. A portion of the planet's atmosphere is visible here, as is its shadow on the surface of the rings.

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[Thursday, December 02, 2004] After its long journey Huygens is due to reach to surface on 14 January 2005. ESA wanted to have music on board to arouse the interest of the world's public, particularly the young, and to leave a trace of humanity in the unknown.

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[Thursday, December 02, 2004] The usually bright B ring (at center) appears very dim in this view of the rings taken on the side of the rings that is not illuminated.

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[Thursday, December 02, 2004] As Cassini scientists work to understand the newly-exposed surface of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, they have found an interesting arrowhead-shaped feature, shown in the center of this synthetic aperture radar image.

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[Friday, December 03, 2004] As it completed its first orbit of Saturn, Cassini zoomed in on the rings to catch this wondrous view of the shepherd moon Prometheus (102 kilometers, or 63 miles across) working its influence on the multi-stranded and kinked F ring.

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[Saturday, December 04, 2004] This close-up of the lit side of Saturn's outer B ring and the Cassini Division looks like a phonograph record. There are subtle, wavelike patterns, hundreds of narrow features and a noticeable abrupt change in overall brightness beyond the dark gap.

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[Saturday, December 04, 2004] A knotted ringlet within the Encke Gap is the main attraction in this image. The Encke Gap is a small division that is about 300 kilometers wide. The tiny moon Pan 20 kilometers across orbits within the gap and maintains it.

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[Saturday, December 04, 2004] Kinks and knots dance around Saturn in this movie of the F ring. From a great distance, as during Cassini's initial approach to Saturn, the F ring appears as a faint, knotted strand of material at the outer fringe of Saturn's immense ring system.

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[Saturday, December 04, 2004] The Cassini spacecraft is in an excellent state of health and is operating normally. The primary activity this week was the execution of the final Huygens Probe checkout (PCO).

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[Tuesday, December 07, 2004] One year after Mars Express' arrival at Mars, the mighty rules of celestial mechanics have again set Christmas as the date for a major ESA event in deep space.

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[Tuesday, December 07, 2004] The center of this image shows an area approximately 75,000 kilometers from Saturn. The dark gap through the middle of the frame is the Colombo gap which houses the bright, narrow, eccentric Colombo ringlet, in resonance with the moon Titan.

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[Saturday, December 11, 2004] A gorgeous Dione poses for Cassini, with shadowed craters and bright, wispy streaks first observed by the Voyager spacecraft 24 years ago. The wispy areas will be imaged at higher resolution in mid-December 2004.

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[Saturday, December 11, 2004] This image was taken on December 10, 2004 and received on Earth December 11, 2004. The camera was pointing toward TITAN at approximately 1,709,968 kilometers away, and the image was taken using the CL1 and CB3 filters.

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[Saturday, December 11, 2004] As Cassini swung around to the dark side of the planet during its first close passage after orbit insertion, the intrepid spacecraft spied three ring moons whizzing around the planet.

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[Saturday, December 11, 2004] This view of Saturn's outer C ring shows the extreme variations in brightness, along with the subtle, large-scale wavy variations discovered 24 years ago by NASA's Voyager spacecraft.

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[Saturday, December 11, 2004] This majestic view of Saturn captures several phenomena of interest to scientists working on the Cassini mission. The planet's nighttime atmosphere looms ahead -- an excellent place to search for storms and lightning.

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[Tuesday, December 14, 2004] Bright streaks of cloud in Titan's southern hemisphere are visible. Linear clouds such as these have appeared intermittently in this region of Titan.

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[Tuesday, December 14, 2004] The view shows pronounced banding in the Titan atmosphere. The image has been processed to enhance the banding, but a few artifacts of the imaging process, such as the small "doughnut" shape at right, remain.

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[Tuesday, December 14, 2004] This view from Cassini's second close flyby of Titan on Dec. 13, 2004 shows bright material within the large dark region west of Xanadu.

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[Tuesday, December 14, 2004] This image was taken on December 13, 2004 and received on Earth December 14, 2004. The camera was pointing toward TITAN at approximately 181,817 kilometers away

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[Tuesday, December 14, 2004] This image was taken on December 13, 2004 and received on Earth December 14, 2004. The camera was pointing toward TITAN at approximately 130,309 kilometers away.

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[Tuesday, December 14, 2004] The Cassini spacecraft completed a successful rendezvous with Saturn's moon Titan on Monday, Dec. 13.  This was the last pass before the European Space Agency's Huygens probe is sprung loose from Cassini on Christmas Eve (in U.S. time zones).

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[Wednesday, December 15, 2004] This image was taken on December 15, 2004 and received on Earth December 15, 2004. The camera was pointing toward DIONE at approximately 81,422 kilometers away

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[Wednesday, December 15, 2004] This image was taken on December 14, 2004 and received on Earth December 15, 2004. The camera was pointing toward DIONE at approximately 167,984 kilometers away, and the image was taken using the UV2 and UV3 filters.

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[Wednesday, December 15, 2004] This image was taken on December 14, 2004 and received on Earth December 15, 2004. The camera was pointing toward Saturn at approximately 542,867 kilometers away.

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[Thursday, December 16, 2004] Using adaptive optics on the Gemini North and Keck II telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawai'i, a U.S. team has discovered a new phenomenon in the atmosphere of Saturn's largest moon Titan.

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[Thursday, December 16, 2004] As NASA's Cassini spacecraft approached Saturn last July, it found evidence that lightning on Saturn is roughly one million times stronger than lightning on Earth.

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[Thursday, December 16, 2004] Ice particles are key players in the ever-changing panorama at Saturn, according to a new study led by a University of Colorado at Boulder professor using an instrument on the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft now at the ringed planet.

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[Thursday, December 16, 2004] Cassini captured Dione against the globe of Saturn as it approached the icy moon for its close rendezvous on Dec. 14, 2004. This natural color view shows the moon has strong variations in brightness across its surface.

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[Thursday, December 16, 2004] Evidence of changing weather patterns in the skies over Titan's southern region are revealed in these false color images obtained by the Cassini's visual infrared mapping spectrometer over two recent flybys of this largest of Saturn's satellites.

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[Thursday, December 16, 2004] Cassini has found Titan's upper atmosphere to consist of a surprising number of layers of haze, as shown in this ultraviolet image of Titan's night side limb, colorized to look like true color.

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[Saturday, December 18, 2004] A massive eruption of atomic oxygen from Saturn's outer rings may be an indication that the planet's wispy E ring is eroding so fast that it could disappear within 100 million years if not replenished.

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[Saturday, December 18, 2004] This week's main event was the Titan-B flyby. At this time the orientation for CAPS allowed it to observe Titan's ionosphere and magnetospheric interaction on the inbound leg and until 25 minutes after closest approach.

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[Wednesday, December 22, 2004] The highlights of the first year of the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn can be broken into two chapters: first, the arrival of the Cassini orbiter at Saturn in June, and second, the release of the Huygens probe on Dec. 24, 2004, on a path toward Titan.

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[Wednesday, December 22, 2004] Titan, it turns out, may be a very stormy place. In 2001, a group of astronomers discovered methane clouds near the south pole of Saturn's largest moon, resolving a debate about whether such clouds exist amid the haze of its atmosphere.

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[Wednesday, December 22, 2004] When Huygens makes its plunge into the atmosphere of Titan radio telescopes of the NRAO will help extract the maximum possible amount of information from an experiment unique in human history.

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[Friday, December 24, 2004] On board activities this week primarily involved preparations for the Huygens Probe separation event.   Orbital trim maneuver #8 was successfully completed on the spacecraft on December 16.

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[Friday, December 24, 2004] ESA's Huygens probe successfully detached from NASA's Cassini orbiter today to begin a three-week journey to Saturn’s moon Titan. All systems performed as expected and there were no problems reported with the Cassini spacecraft.

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[Sunday, December 26, 2004] This image was taken about 12 hours after the probe's release from the orbiter. The probe successfully detached from Cassini on Dec. 24, 2004, and is on course for its January 14 encounter with Titan.

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[Sunday, December 26, 2004] This image was taken on December 25, 2004 and received on Earth December 25, 2004. The camera was pointing toward Iapetus at approximately 1,088,060 kilometers away, and the image was taken using the CL1 and CL2 filters.

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[Tuesday, December 28, 2004] The European Space Agency's Huygens probe appears shining as it coasts away from Cassini in this image taken on Dec. 26, 2004, just two days after it successfully detached from the Cassini spacecraft.

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[Tuesday, December 28, 2004] Hints of the curving linear grooves that crisscross bright, icy Enceladus are just discernible in this image captured by Cassini. Enceladus is almost entirely composed of water ice and has a surface as bright as snow. Its diameter is 499 km.

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[Tuesday, December 28, 2004] This was taken on December 18, 2004 and received on Earth December 18, 2004. The camera was pointing toward Mimas.

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[Tuesday, December 28, 2004] The European Space Agency's Huygens probe was successfully released by NASA's Cassini orbiter and is now on a controlled collision course toward Saturn's largest and most mysterious moon, Titan.

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[Wednesday, December 29, 2004] These are the sharpest views of Iapetus from Cassini so far, and they represent better resolution than the best images of this moon achieved by NASA's Voyager spacecraft.

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[Wednesday, December 29, 2004] Cassini's flyby of Saturn's icy moon Iapetus is set for Dec. 31, 2004. One side of Iapetus is bright, and the other is dark. One scenario for this striking difference is that the moon's surface is being resurfaced by some material spewing from within.

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[Wednesday, December 29, 2004] Using an infrared spectrometer on the Cassini-Huygens Spacecraft, researchers have measured the temperature, winds and chemical composition of Saturn, its rings and one of its moons, Phoebe.

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[Wednesday, December 29, 2004] NASA's Cassini spacecraft successfully performed a getaway maneuver on Monday, Dec. 27, to keep it from following the European Space Agency's Huygens probe into the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan.

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[Thursday, December 30, 2004] This map of the surface of Saturn's moon Iapetus (1,436 kilometers, or 892 miles across), generated from images taken by NASA's Voyager spacecraft, illustrates the imaging coverage planned during Cassini's flyby on Dec. 31, 2004.

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[Thursday, December 30, 2004] Cassini is set to cap off 2004 with an encounter of Saturn's moon Iapetus on New Year's Eve. This is Cassini's closest pass yet by one of Saturn's smaller icy satellites since its arrival.  The next close flyby of Iapetus is not until 2007. 

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