The black and white images show segments of the rings, according to officials at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory here.

The probe late Wednesday zipped through Saturn's rings and slowed down to orbiting speed, in a successful conclusion to a seven-year, 3.5 billion-kilometer (2.2 billion-mile) voyage to explore Saturn.

For 96 minutes, the probe's engines burned to bring its speed down enough to be captured by Saturn's gravitational field, which occurred at 9:12 pm California time (0412 GMT Thursday).

Eighteen minutes later, exactly on schedule, NASA received another signal from the probe's high-gain antenna indicating that all systems were operating normally and that it was ready to begin its four-year mission to explore Saturn.

The craft is made up of a US-built orbiter (Cassini) and the European-built probe (Huygens). The US contribution was 2.6 billion dollars and the EU, 660 million. ISA supplied the probe's high-gain antenna which channels all communications with Earth.

The product of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency working together, Cassini-Huygens is the first man-made object to orbit the ringed planet, the sixth from the Sun and second in size after Jupiter.

SPACE.WIRE