Cassini, the adventurous Spacecraft Travelled 2 Billion Miles for 7 Years in Space to Reach Saturn. And This is the First Image Captured. Cassini Diaries - Post 1

When Galileo Galilei looked at the night sky through his telescope, an entire cosmos opened up before his eyes. When he zoomed in onto Saturn in 1609, he observed ears like shape on the planet which he drew in his notebook. It was confusing for him.
 

Many years later, in 1649, a Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens with the improved telescope confirmed that those arms were actually a ring system. He aslo discovered Saturn's moon Titan which is second largest moon in our solar system. Then, in 1675, an Italian-French astronomer Cassini discovered 4 new major moons and a narrow gap that splits Saturn's ring system into two parts, and the gap has since been known as the "Cassini Division."

To study the origin and evolution of the planet saturn's rings & its moons which could give a better understanding of history of our solar system, NASA in collaboration with ESA, Italian Space Agency launched the Cassini-Huygens Spacecraft weighing 5700 kgs on Oct. 15, 1997. It went past several planets — including Venus (twice), Earth and Jupiter — to get a speed boost by taking advantage of each planet's gravity. The spacecraft took 7 years to travel 2 billion miles to reach Saturn & finally entered orbit around Saturn on July 1, 2004. On it's journey to Saturn, spacecraft took the first image of Saturn and it's moon Titan as part of an engineering test of its' camera system. The spacecraft was 285 million kilometers away from the planet, nearly twice the distance between the Sun and Earth, when this image was captured. On its 13 year mission, it  made amazing discoveries of the planet and its exotic icy-moons. Spacecraft flew through its rings, discovered methane lakes on Titan, liquid oceans on moon enceladus etc. Stay tuned. I will be posting high-res images of moons, close-up saturn rings etc.