Images: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Will Cassini, despite all its historic efforts on mankind’s behalf, be retired this year, too prematurely by far for such a dedicated worker? Its contract predicted a place in the pasture by 2008, though its many fans want to give it at least a couple more years to romp through the solar system on its unimaginably long tether.

The odyssey began in October 1997, Europeans as well as Americans picking up the tab, and swept past Venus and Jupiter. Cassini gave its assent to Einstein’s relativity before settling in Saturn’s neighbourhood in mid-2004. There, riding on a plutonium jet that worried a lot of people as it was leaving Florida, Cassini continues to gawk at curious things and count moons, one of which may become its final resting place, virulent plutonium and all.

In the photo above, from the project website, the Dragon Storm performs a jazzy motif in the methane-laden clouds above Saturn’s southern hemisphere, the rings in the background a lovely, but false, blue in infrared.

The storm’s curlicue arms and lobes do a radio-emission rhumba in short bursts through the Saturnian night and sunbathe in the long day, all the while feeding dark, oval stormlets into the great marching rivers of gas clouds, part of a “food chain”, the scientists think, “that harvests the energy of the deep atmosphere and helps maintain the powerful currents”.

Below, little Epimetheus bobs above the planetary rings under the gaze of smoggy Titan, where Cassini said goodbye to its Huygens probe three years ago. Epimetheus is 116 kilometres across, Titan more than 5,000. Perhaps Epimetheus is in turn watching the vast Encke gap in the rings for its tiny brother Pan, a quarter its size and one of only two of Saturn’s 60 moons that live in its rings. The other is Daphnis, one of three that Cassini discovered.

The spacecraft also confirmed that there are indeed spokes in the rings, and found a hurricane with an eye near the planet’s south pole. And last September it had a good look at Iapetus too — and despite my hopes for something really crazy, found no one living inside the walnut.