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In the year 1997, NASA launched its Cassini spacecraft for a journey to the Saturn planet, where it would gather a number of facts by closely studying the Solar System’s ringed world.

The Cassini craft delivered much more than our wildest expectations, presenting fresh breathtaking views of the least ever dense planet known to man. It viewed Saturn in an eclipse, making a fresh discovery of two outer rings. The crafts infrared eyes had a view of Saturn’s hazes beneath its top-level clouds.

Perhaps what was even more surprising during the last two decades of the study, was the amount of information that was discovered about the Saturnian moons, plus the active liquid methane on the Titan’s surface, uncovering the origin of Iapetus’s the planet’s two-toned moon, the subsurface ocean that erupts in spectacular geysers, at Enceladus and the purpose of the dark material from Phoebe.

During the Cassini’s study, the planet’s North Pole was found to have a strange hexagonal storm, which is thought to be stable through century-long timescales. The Huygens probe it released descended onto Titan, the planets largest moon, discovering a fascinating landscape, with liquid methane lakes and waterfalls. Incredible right?

The mystery behind Iapetus, Saturn’s two-toned moon, was also solved during the study as well. The dark material coming from Phoebe the captured comet makes the ice on a single side sublimate on the other.

While Enceladus, the planet’s icy, outer moon, was discovered to carry a subsurface water-iced ocean, that erupts in spectacular geysers. Saturn’s rings were found to be composed of 99.9 percent of water-ice. They were also determined to have been around for well over hundred million years.

And finally, the Cassini discovered and viewed what has been described as the largest storm in our Solar System’s known history: the 2011′s Saturnian hurricane.