From high above Saturn, Cassini spies an odd, hexagon-shaped storm

The end is nigh for Cassini, the venerable probe that NASA launched to Saturn way back in 1997. The probe has dazzled us with views of the diverse planetary system since 2004. Now engineers want to send the aging spacecraft out with style, and as part of its final maneuvers Cassini will skim through Saturn's iconic ring system 20 times during the coming months before the mission's end on September 15, 2017.

Cassini performed the first of these maneuvers last weekend. As part of this re-positioning to a new flight path, Cassini has captured new photos of Saturn's northern hemisphere and its distinctive, hexagon-shaped storm. These images were taken with the spacecraft's wide-angle camera on December 2, just before the first graze of Saturn's rings, from a distance of about 640,000km.

The hexagon is a current of air in Saturn's upper atmosphere, somewhat similar to the jet stream on Earth. It measures about 30,000km across (Earth has a diameter of less than 13,000km), with estimated winds of about 320km per hour. Scientists don't know how long the feature has existed, but they think because there are no landforms—such as mountains on Earth—to disrupt the weather pattern it may persist for a long time. In addition to the overall structure, individual vortices of storms spin around within the hexagon-shaped system, some of which are as large as 3,500km, twice the size of the biggest hurricanes ever measured on Earth.

Cassini will make weekly passes near Saturn's ring system through April 22. After that point, the spacecraft will make a final visit near the intriguing moon Titan and its hydrocarbon seas, before beginning a series of plunges between the planet and its innermost ring, a gap of just 2,400km. Finally, on September 15, it will fly silently, and forever, into the planet's atmosphere. (We're not crying—you're crying.)

Listing image by NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute.