Saturn and its innermost ring on April 26, the first of 22 such encounters before it will plunge into Saturn’s atmosphere in September What Cassini did not detect were many of the collisions of dust particles hitting the spacecraft as it passed through the plane of the rings. You can hear a couple of clicks,” said William S. Kurth, a research scientist at the University of Iowa who is the principal investigator for Cassini’s radio and plasma science instrument. The few dust hits that were recorded .
