29: The Serendipitous Rings of Saturn

Saturn. There's no denying, it's gorgeous. And for 13 years the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, a joint mission by NASA, the ESA and the ASI, orbited the ringed planet, sending back stunning images of the rings, the many moons and moonlets, and the planet surface, as well as copious data that has changed astronomers understanding of Saturn and its system. Some of that data, released recently, shows that those iconic rings aren't as massive as once thought — which also implies they're not terribly old either, and could disappear in a few hundred million years. On a cosmic time scale, blink and you miss them! We're lucky to be here to witness Saturn's magnificence.