Do you know what today is? 🎵 25 years ago, the Cassini spacecraft and Huygens lander probe launched, beginning the mission to study Saturn and its moons. The voyage to the planet took seven years, requiring four gravity assist maneuvers (a gravity assist is a technique that uses a planet to accelerate a spacecraft). Cassini-Huygens, a joint project between NASA, europeanspaceagency, agenziaspazialeitaliana, and nasajpl, entered an elliptical orbit around Saturn on July 1, 2004; it was the first spacecraft to do so. Cassini’s 13-year-long investigation of the Saturn system—initially planned to be four years long, but extended twice—allowed us to observe Saturn for nearly half of its 30-year orbit around the Sun, seeing hexagonal cloud patterns around Saturn’s north pole and a long-lived storm that circled the planet’s northern hemisphere. Cassini also made extraordinary discoveries on Saturn’s moons, like ice volcanoes on Enceladus and hydrocarbon lakes on Titan. Though Cassini e...