Cassini climbs over Saturn's poles and captures this stunning image - See pic!

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

New Delhi: The Cassini spacecraft has obtained a stunning photo of Saturn, like you've never seen it before.

For most of 2015, the spacecraft orbited in Saturn's ring plane - around the planet's equator. This enabled a season of flybys of the planet's icy moons, but did not allow for angled views of the rings and the planet's poles, like this one, says NASA.

But in early 2016, the spacecraft began to increase its orbital inclination, climbing higher over the poles in preparation for the mission's final spectacular orbits in 2017.

Cassini obtained this image with the spacecraft wide-angle camera on February 26 2016 using a spectral filter which preferentially admits wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers.

The view, which was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.7 million miles (2.8 million kilometers) from Saturn, looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 16 degrees above the ring plane.

Cassini, which arrived at Saturn in 2004, now seeks to make exciting new discoveries in a second extended mission, which goes through September 2017.

(Source: NASA)