
Cassini, NASA’s last major mission to Saturn, famously plunged to its fiery death in the gas giant’s atmosphere at the end of its mission. It had captured more accurate in-situ data of the Saturnian system than any mission before or since. But there’s one particular part that it couldn’t directly approach – Saturn’s rings. But NASA very obviously wants to take a nice up-close look at them, as they have recently funded a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Phase I grant to send a swarm of 10,000 highly expendable “femtosatellites” to get up close and personal with the most spectacular rings in our solar system.
This post was originally published on this site