As NASA celebrates 10 years of Cassini at Saturn, here's a Top-Ten list of the spacecraft's amazing discoveries and incredible images

Tuesday, July 1, 2014, 1:12 PM - Ten years ago today, on July 1, 2004, NASA's Cassini arrived at Saturn, dropping into the ringed gas giant's gravity well and beginning the first of its four-year missions to investigate the planet, its extensive ring system and its multitude of mysterious moons.

When the Cassini-Huygens mission arrived at its destination back in 2004, the scientists and engineers involved in the mission were understandably quite happy, as the video below shows:

After all, while the team had a few milestones on the spacecraft's trip - flybys of Venus, Earth and Jupiter, and testing out Einstein's Theory of Relativity - the day they had all been awaiting for nearly 7 years had finally arrived. It was well-worth the wait, too, as Cassini has returned some incredible discoveries and spectacular images over the past 10 years. Here's a personal "Top Ten" from Cassini's first 10 years:

1. Titan's surface is revealed, giving us a glimpse of what Earth was like in the distant past.

(Credit: Originals from ESA/NASA/JPL/University of Arizona(right) and NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/University of Idaho(left), combined by S.Sutherland)

Dropping its Huygens probe into the hazy methane atmosphere of Titan, and then following that up with radar images over the past nine-and-a-half years, NASA and the European Space Agency captured the first images of the moon's surface (left) and produced extensive maps of the features on the surface, such as the various hydrocarbon lakes (right). These views revealed that Titan is very much like Earth way, before life developed on our planet, nearly 4 billion years ago.

2. Cassini catches icy moon Enceladus blasting out water vapour plumes, hinting at subsurface ocean

(Credit: Originals by NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute, combined by S.Sutherland)

This image, taken by Cassini on Nov. 27, 2005, shows plumes of water vapour streaming off the south polar region of Enceladus, one of Saturn's innermost moons. Nearly two years later, researchers completed a study on these plumes, using enhanced images like in the colour overlay to identify the individual fountains. More recently, flybys of Cassini detected a region under these plumes where the pull of gravity is lower than the surrounding area, suggesting that there is an extensive ocean of liquid water under the icy surface.

3. Tall vertical structures reach high above the edges of Saturn's rings

(Credit: NASA/JPL/SSI)

In late July of 2009, just weeks before Saturn reached its equinox - when the planet's northern and southern hemispheres would receive equal light from the Sun - Cassini snapped this image of the outer edge the B ring and the Cassini division. With the light from the Sun hitting the rings nearly edge-on, towering spires, some reaching to 2.5 kilometres above the 'surface' of the rings, cast long shadows across the ice.

4. Saturn's northern polar hurricane imaged in stunning detail

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/Hampton University

This image shows off a false-colour view of 'the hexagon' - a persistent feature that surrounds Saturn's north pole (click here for a larger, animated version). Although astronomers have known about the hexagon for years now, thanks to other spacecraft missions and the Hubble Space Telescope, what lay at the heart of the feature remained a mystery until just recently, when the north pole emerged from winter into the Sun's light. Revealed to us for the first time was an immense swirling hurricane, directly over the pole. For a sense of scale, you could fit two Earths side-by-side across the entire hexagon, and the central hurricane (shown in the deepest pinks and purples) has an eye roughly 50 times larger than the eye of your typical Earth hurricane. A beautiful, natural colour still image of the hexagon, which has been named Spring at the North Pole, can be seen on NASA's website (click here). 

5. Saturn's rings may still be making moons!

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

The above picture may not be the best one to show off Saturn's rings, but it reveals something amazing. The 'disturbance' at the very edge of the ring (bottom centre) is quite possible a new moon in the works. The object causing the disturbance, which members of the Cassini team nicknamed 'Peggy' is too small to see in this image. It's estimated at around 1 kilometre in diameter, whereas the pixels in the image are 7 kilometres on a side. It's possible Peggy may simply be smashed to bits and thus rejoin the ring, however if it survives it will likely continue to accumulate more mass and migrate beyond the ring to become Saturn's newest moon.

NEXT PAGE: ALL THAT SCIENCE IS COOL, BUT HOW ABOUT SOME AWESOME PICTURES?