The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Cassini spacecraft, which has been on a 20-year-long journey exploring Saturn, has sent back a few remarkable images of the planet. The photos show “a sliver of Saturn’s sunlit atmosphere, with its icy rings stretched across the foreground as a dark band”.

Nasa said Cassini had shot the image, titled “Saturnian Dawn”, on March 31 from a distance of around 6.2 lakh miles (1 million km) from Saturn. The scale of the image is 38 miles (61 km) per pixel.

The finale orbits bring the spacecraft closer to the planet than ever before, because of which Casini has been able to beam back “stunning, high-resolution images and new insights” into Saturn’s interior structure and the origins of its rings, Nasa said.

Cassini – a joint mission by Nasa, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency – has been diving between the rings to collect data. Once it plunges into Saturn’s atmosphere after 22 dives between the rings, it will send back data on the atmosphere’s composition till its signal is lost.