The black and white images show segments of the rings and bands of varying sizes and shades, according to officials at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Jet Propulsion Laboratory here.

"Those images are mind-blowing," said Carolyn Porco, leader of the Cassini imaging science team.

"Even though we have had a long time to think about our images, we planned them, we chose the exposures, the filters, we know what we were looking at," Porco said. "I am surprised at how surprised I am at the beauty and the clarity of these images.

"They are shocking to me," she said. "Some images were so shocking I thought my team here was playing tricks on me and showing me a simulation of the rings and not the rings itself."

The space probe was 20,000 kilometers (12,427 miles) from Saturn when it took the photos, the closest it will ever get, said Porco.

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 the planet.

For 96 minutes, the probe's engines burned to reduce its speed sufficiently 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 exploration mission.

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

The probe is the first man-made object to orbit the ringed planet, the sixth from the Sun and the second in size after Jupiter.

Over the next four years, Cassini-Huygens will orbit Saturn 76 times and make 52 passes by seven of the planet's 31 known moons.

It will fly by Saturn's largest moon, Titan, 45 times to create a high-resolution map of its surface. On December 25, the Cassini craft will release the Huygens probe to land on Titan and become the first man-made object to land on another planet's moon.

Huygens will touch down on Titan 20 days later to transmit scientific data back to Earth.

SPACE.WIRE