God the artist
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Praise be to Allah Lord of the worlds.
It's taken almost seven years, but the US/European Cassini probe slipped between the F and G rings of Saturn at a speed of 70,000 kilometers per hour (43,500 miles per hour), fired it's rockets for 96 minutes and became the first spacecraft to orbit around the planet. The Cassini-Huygens mission consists of the Cassini (a NASA built orbiter) that is now in orbit around Saturn, and the Huygens probe (built by the ESA-European Space Agency), which will now try to land on Titan! This has taken twenty years of planning by scientists in the US and 17 nations, and $3.3 billion funded by NASA, the ESA and the Italian Space Agency.
Cassini is huge, about the size of a bus. It's the third largest spacecraft ever launched. Because it's so big, it's had to use four gravity-assists to get to Saturn Earth, Venus twice, and then Jupiter. This is why it's taken almost 7 years to get there.
edit Saturn is 900 million miles from Earth.
These were images captured by Cassini May - June 2004
http//www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2004/jun/phoebe/rings300.jpg
http//www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2004/jun/phoebe/ultraviolet300.jpg
http//saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/rings/images/PIA06077.jpg
http//www.nasa.gov/images/content/61696main_soi7-516.jpg
http//www.nasa.gov/images/content/61705main_soi8-516.jpg
http//photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpegMod/PIA02275_modest.jpg
http//saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/saturn/images/image30.jpg
^This was taken in October of 2002.It's just amazing how the rings, composed of space "debris" orbit the planet so uniformly. Praise be to Allah Lord of the worlds.