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| - The highly saturated image was an artistic representation of Cassini's final mission. Actual images captured by the spacecraft were monochrome with far less detail.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft orbited Saturn for more than 10 years, capturing images of its rings and moons in never-before-seen detail. Since at least 2019, posts on social media have shared a supposed photograph taken by Cassini in its final moments.
A viral TikTok video published on Dec. 21, 2024, claimed the image was the "last photo taken by the Cassini spacecraft before its disintegration in Saturn's atmosphere." At the time of this publication, it had been viewed more than 3.6 million times.
However, the above image was an artistic rendering of what Cassini may have seen, not an actual photograph it captured. Because of this, we've rated this claim miscaptioned.
NASA published the saturated yellow-hued image on April 6, 2017, noting it was an artist's concept showing "an over-the-shoulder view of Cassini making one of its Grand Finale dives over Saturn." Other images in the collection show imagined renderings captured by Cassini during its 22 orbits between Saturn and its rings, before plunging into the planet on its final mission in 2017.
(NASA/JPL-Caltech)
NASA wrote that Cassini was "one of the most ambitious efforts ever mounted in planetary exploration" as a "sophisticated robotic spacecraft sent to study Saturn and its complex system of rings and moons in unprecedented detail." It described the mission thusly:
Cassini carried a probe called Huygens to the Saturn system. The probe, which was built by ESA, parachuted to the surface of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, in January 2005—the most distant landing to date in our solar system. Huygens returned spectacular images and other science results during a two-and-a-half-hour descent through Titan's hazy atmosphere, before coming to rest amid rounded cobbles of ice on a floodplain damp with liquid methane.
Cassini completed its initial four-year mission in June 2008 and earned two mission extensions that enabled the team to delve even deeper into Saturn's mysteries. Key discoveries during its 13 years at Saturn included a global ocean with strong indications of hydrothermal activity within Enceladus and liquid methane seas on Titan. The mission ended on Sept. 15, 2017.
Cassini embarked on its "Grand Finale" in April 2017, during which it dove weekly through the 1,200-mile-wide gap between Saturn and its rings.
The actual images taken by cameras aboard Cassini are much less detailed and dramatic than the renderings.
Below, the last photo taken by the spacecraft is a monochrome view looking at Saturn's night side as it is lit by reflected light from the rings and shows the location where the spacecraft would crash-land hours later.
(NASA/JPL-Caltech)
NASA described the image as:
A natural color view, created using images taken with red, green and blue spectral filters, is also provided (Figure B, right). The imaging cameras obtained this view at approximately the same time that Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer made its own observations of the impact area in the thermal infrared.
This location — the site of Cassini's atmospheric entry — was at this time on the night side of the planet, but would rotate into daylight by the time Cassini made its final dive into Saturn's upper atmosphere, ending its remarkable 13-year exploration of Saturn.
The view was acquired on Sept. 14, 2017 at 19:59 UTC (spacecraft event time). The view was taken in visible light using the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera at a distance of 394,000 miles (634,000 kilometers) from Saturn. Image scale is about 11 miles (17 kilometers).
A gallery of 395,927 images contains the full record of Cassini's raw images taken from Feb. 20, 2004, to the end of the mission on Sept. 15, 2017. The image below, for example, was captured on Sept. 13, 2017, and shows Saturn's rings.
(NASA)
Another black-and-white photo taken on Sept. 12, 2017, shows Saturn's moon Titan.
(NASA)
Snopes has looked into other claims surrounding space images, including photos said to show Helix Nebula captured by NASA's Hubble Telescope, an image of an astronaut performing the first untethered space walk, and a deeply hued photo that supposedly showed the planet Jupiter.
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