Cassini's Spectacular Final Year at Saturn with Dr. Matthew Tiscareno

With its 13-year mission at Saturn now complete, Cassini takes its place as the most spectacularly successful interplanetary mission in the history of NASA. In its final ten months (from December 2016 to September 2017), Cassini transformed itself into a whole new mission with its Grand Finale, including 20 close fly-bys off the outer edge of Saturn's rings and 22 passes between the rings and the cloud-tops of the planet, culminating in a final plunge into the depths of Saturn. The detailed new data obtained during these maneuvers has brought Saturn's rings, its clouds, its small inner moons, and more into sharper focus than ever before. In this lecture, Cassini rings scientist Matthew Tiscareno will review the rich harvest of the Cassini mission.

Matthew Tiscareno is a Senior Research Scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, where he studies the dynamics of planetary systems, including planetary rings. As a participating scientist and an Imaging Team Associate with the Cassini Project, he took a leading role in planning Cassini's close-up images of Saturn's rings during the Ring Grazing Orbits and the Grand Finale.

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