As a formal goodbye to Dione, NASA's Cassini spacecraft delivered its final images of Saturn's moon.
According to BBC News, the new images are part of a goodbye tour of sorts, as Cassini's mission managers anticipate the spacecraft crashing in 2017. Cassini snapped the latest images of Dione, one more than 60 moons that orbit Saturn, from about 500km above its surface.
NASA posted the collection of photos online.
"I am moved, as I know everyone else is, looking at these exquisite images of Dione's surface and crescent, and knowing that they are the last we will see of this far-off world for a very long time to come," Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team lead at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo., said in a press release. "Right down to the last, Cassini has faithfully delivered another extraordinary set of riches. How lucky we have been."
The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft is a collaborative effort with the European and Italian Space Agencies, as it was named after Giovanni Cassini, an Italian astronomer, and Christiaan Huygens, a Dutch scientist and mathematician. The spacecraft launched in 1997 and is expected to plummet through Saturn's rings in 2017.
"We had just enough time to snap a few images, giving us nice, high resolution looks at the surface," Tilmann Denk, a Cassini participating scientist at Freie University in Berlin, said in the release. "We were able to make use of reflected sunlight from Saturn as an additional light source, which revealed details in the shadows of some of the images."
