In Cassini’s Grand Finale orbits — the final orbits of its nearly 20-year mission — the spacecraft traveled in an elliptical path that sent it diving at tens of thousands of miles per hour through the 1,500-mile-wide (2,400-kilometer) space between the rings and the planet where no spacecraft had ventured before.

Each of these last 22 orbits took about six and a half days to complete. They began April 22 and ended Sept. 15. When Cassini was nearest to Saturn during each orbit, the spacecraft’s speed ranged between 75,000 and 78,000 miles per hour (121,000 and 126,000 kilometers per hour), depending on the orbit.

The Grand Finale orbits were so named because they not only carried Cassini to its end, but because they were truly grand. The spacecraft flew through an unexplored region of the Saturnian system, producing unique images and attempting to solve longtime mysteries, such as the mass of Saturn’s rings and the planet’s rotation rate — the length of a Saturn day. And then during Cassini’s last five orbits, the spacecraft dipped down to directly sample Saturn’s upper atmosphere.

The summaries posted on this page for each Grand Finale orbit include only a few highlights of the many unparalleled science investigations that Cassini performed during these unprecedented orbits. Also, because Saturn is a gas giant, Cassini couldn't be described as being a certain distance from the planet’s “surface.” So, to convey Cassini’s distance from Saturn, each summary also includes the spacecraft’s closest approach to Saturn’s 1-bar level for that orbit. A bar is the atmospheric pressure you experience on Earth at sea level.