Cassini-Huygens: Exploring Saturn's System

53 named moons on one of its websites.

In fact, Cassini discovered two new moons almost immediately after arriving (Methone and Pallene) and before 2004 had ended, it detected Polydeuces. [evidence of liquid water on Enceladus, a frozen moon that Discovering and then pinning down more details about a 50-mile landslides on Iapetus;

Saturn has not gone ignored, either. For example, in 2012, a NASA study postulated that Saturn's jet streams in the atmosphere may be report about what he and his team learned after operating a mission for such a long time. While enthusiasm kept the scientists going through the long years (which sometimes required working during the holidays or in the middle of the night), engineering was also key.

Kim Steadman, an engineer on the Cassini team for 14 years, said that redundancy was essential. She said that a reaction wheel and some of the probe's thrusters failed during the mission, which would have meant the spacecraft couldn't point its instruments to collect data, or communicate with Earth through pointing its antenna at the planet. However, Cassini's mission continued because it had backups.

The team plans to issue the report to help with future spacecraft planning; one of those recommendations might be including a gas gauge. Cassini died with about 1 percent of its fuel left, but lead propulsion engineer Todd Barber told Space.com that he had a tough time estimating how much fuel was left in Cassini; he had to do so through various indirect methods. This meant that during the final months, Barber was slightly nervous about maneuvers requiring propulsion, since there was a margin of error for his calculations and didn't know if there was enough fuel remaining to carry them out.

The mission may be over, but science results will continue to flow for decades because not all of the information has been analyzed yet. NASA also continued to release new photos from the spacecraft even after Cassini had died. In late September 2017, for example, the agency five Saturn-related concepts are contending for the next New Frontiers mission, a program that in past years yielded the New Horizons Pluto spacecraft, the Juno Jupiter orbiter, and the asteroid-return spacecraft OSIRIS-REx. The five proposals are:

SPRITE (Saturn Probe Interior and Atmosphere Explorer), which would deliberately fly into Saturn's atmosphere to look at its composition and structure for roughly 90 minutes. Cassini lasted only a couple of minutes during its plunge, but it was not designed for this work.

Oceanus, which is designed to look at Titan's potential for habitability by examining organic molecules "through the methanologic cycle and assessing exchange processes between the atmosphere, surface and subsurface," NASA's Cassini mission page