Matt McIrvin's Freaky Alternate Reality

I haven't done a lot of Saturn-blogging lately, though it's not for lack of material. Cassini has been soldiering on there in its extended Equinox Mission, taking more great pictures of the planet and its rings and moons. This recent one of Prometheus, a weird-looking little moon shaped like an elongated flying saucer and shadowed by the nearby F ring on which it tugs, is pretty great.

Anyway, here's an article by John Spencer on the Planetary Society blog about the road ahead. Cassini's mission just got extended until 2017. The propellant will be running low, so they'll have to go easy on the maneuvers and make as much use of Titan's gravity as they can.

But the best part is the finale. As with the Galileo Jupiter mission, they want to send Cassini plunging into Saturn to minimize the slim chance that it might contaminate any of the moons with Earth biology. But before that, with not much to lose, the spacecraft will (pending final NASA approval) make 23 orbits in which it threads its way between the innermost ring and the cloud tops of Saturn. This should be something to see.