A team from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) successfully collected data from the recent operational test of an Air Force Global Strike Command unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base.

What a parting gift the Cassini mission gave us.

Below is a movie sequence of images, garnered from the final dedicated observation of the Enceladus' geysers by the imitable Cassini spacecraft.

Back in August of 2017, Cassini stared at Enceladus for 14 hours, looking at the moon's night side. The movie begins with a view of the part of the surface lit by reflected light from Saturn and transitions to completely unilluminated terrain. About halfway through the sequence, the exposure time of the images changes in order to make fainter features more visible as the light level drops.

"That's why stars appear towards the end—they're the small dots streaking by," said Paul Byrne, planetary scientist and associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis, who brought this animation to our attention on Twitter.

As part of NASA's Discovery Program, the mission to explore a metal-rich asteroid is well on its way to an August 2022 launch.

With NASA's Psyche mission now less than a year from launch, anticipation is building. By next spring, the fully assembled spacecraft will ship from the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida for a launch period that opens Aug. 1, 2022.

In early 2026, the Psyche spacecraft will arrive at its target, an asteroid of the same name in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.