Hey everyone,

I currently lecture on spacecraft trajectories, orientation, and astrodynamics at the University of Stuttgart.

It can get veeeeeery theoretical... so I wanted to bring the concepts to life with a visualization. I chose an example that is personal to me: NASA's Cassini.

I did my Master’s thesis and PhD focusing on Cassini, and I still work on the mission part-time; specifically doing post-processing and machine learning for the Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA) instrument.

I noticed there weren't many (if at all) visualizations of spacecraft movements + orientations etc., so I took the raw NASA data, used Python to process it, and rendered this continuous animation of Cassini's final year in 2017.

It is absolutely unbelievable how humanity is able to achieve this level of precision ... flying right through the gap between Saturn and its rings.

The animation tracks the spacecraft from January 1st, 2017, all the way to its intentional atmospheric entry on September 15th. I'd love to hear your thoughts, and I'm happy to answer any questions about the data, the trajectories, or working on the CDA!

https://youtu.be/t9QmHLFh_E8?si=P0YtUtL845rLy6zK&t=208

Thomas

This one was a bit tougher to make because Saturn enjoying it and Saturn sleeping was done with a png of the Cassini and Voyager 2 photos of Saturn, while this photo by Pioneer 11 was not a png, thus the background wasn't transparent

this was posted last year but...good to know

Enjoy this Picture i made of Human Saturn Ehe

For a while I imagined Saturn having a pillow tucked between itself and its rings, as well as its tilt being it lying down. So I got the iconic Voyager 2 photo of Saturn and made this

See also: The publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics.

How many baby mommas did Saturn get busy with?! And how much does he get paid in child support?! /hj

Hello r/Saturn, just found and joined this subreddit, Saturn is my favorite planet, it is the ICONIC PLANET and the most elegant and beautiful. That is all.

See also: The summary of the study as it it was published in ArXiV.

I had to delete the post where this had Kyplanet's video on J1407b not being real because shortly after he made the video, he found out that he misinterpreted the info on J1407b not existing, stating that its protoplanetary disk (not a ring system) is what likely doesn't exist, but J1407b itself possibly does exist.

So I decided to post this edited picture of Saturn on here again but without the video screenshot so that people on here can still enjoy it and maybe find uses for it

I like how Saturn's oblateness is impossible to miss in the Pioneer photos (it is still noticeable in a number of the more modern photos like the Voyager and Cassini ones)