What Cassini found as it plunged into Saturn a year ago

Story highlights Cassini data is shedding new light on Saturn and its rings Material from the rings rains down into the planet and changes its atmosphere CNN — A year after Cassini ended its 20-year mission to study Saturn, the last data the spacecraft recorded before plunging into the planet’s atmosphere are revealing its long-held secrets. Saturn’s ‘ring rain’ During the final plunge, Cassini’s Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer acted as the “nose” of the spacecraft, directly sampling the composition and structure of the atmosphere. This was in the hopes of investigating the “ring rain” phenomenon discovered by NASA’s Voyager mission in the early 1980s, in which it appeared that the rings were raining material onto the planet and causing changes in the atmosphere. This infalling material likely affects the atmospheric chemistry and the carbon content of Saturn’s ionosphere and atmosphere.” Because the ring is spinning faster than the planet’s atmosphere, the inflow of materials could actually change the carbon and oxygen content of the atmosphere over time, the researchers said.