NASA Wants to Toss 10,000 Tiny Probes Directly Into Saturn's Rings

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Cassini, NASA’s last major mission to Saturn, famously plunged to its fiery death in the gas giant’s atmosphere at the end of its mission.

It had captured more accurate in-situ data of the Saturnian system than any mission before or since.

But there’s one particular part that it couldn’t directly approach - Saturn’s rings.

But NASA very obviously wants to take a nice up-close look at them, as they have recently funded a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Phase I grant to send a swarm of 10,000 highly expendable “femtosatellites” to get up close and personal with the most spectacular rings in our solar system.