Q&A with Jonathan Lunine on Enceladus’ prospects for life

Barreling through space near the inner edge of Saturn’s wispy D ring, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft shielded from itself bits of ice and dust Sunday as the probe made its most dangerous plunge close to the planet, collecting spectacular edge-on views of Saturn’s rings with an on-board camera.

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft sped through a gap between Saturn and its rings for the second time Tuesday after data from the probe’s first perilous passage through the unexplored region last week found it to contain fewer potentially hazardous dust particles than expected.

Guglielmo Aglietti is the director of the Surrey Space Center in Britain, and he leads a team of scientists and engineers who developed an experiment named RemoveDebris to demonstrate techniques to approach, capture and remove space junk from orbit.