NASA: Cassini’s First Fantastic Dive Past Saturn

As NASA’s Cassini spacecraft made its first-ever dive through the gap between Saturn and its rings on April 26, 2017, one of its imaging cameras took a series of rapid-fire images that were used to make this movie sequence. The video begins with a view of the vortex at Saturn’s north pole, then heads past the outer boundary of the planet’s hexagon-shaped jet stream and continues further southward. The movie sequence of Cassini images was produced by Kunio Sayanagi and John Blalock of Hampton University, working in collaboration with the Cassini imaging team. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Hampton University A detailed caption describing these video clips, and the unedited clips themselves, are available at For more information about Cassini’s Grand Finale, visit