It's taken seven years to get there, travelled over 2 billion miles, flown through it's rings and entered orbit and the pictures from orbit are, frankly, absolutely dreadful. the quality and detail is soooo bad - i'm pretty sure i could take better pictures of Saturn than that with my Meade telescope. How come they fitted a multi million dollar probe like that with Polaroid fun cameras?. It's no wonder the lead NASA scientist said she had tears in her eyes.

Sending a signal that far is difficult with the tiny antenna and power source on Casini. This puts a suprisingly low limit on the total bandwidth that they can use to send data to earth. The pictures aren't really very high priority from a scientific viewpoint considering all the different types of data that Casini is designs to take. I'm sure they are using most of the bandwidth for sending (eg) detailed spectra of the diferent parts of the atmospheres of Saturn and it's moons.

bah humbug :-) the approach pictures were far better so i guess your right on that point. from a PR point of view though Nasa will have to release some good stuff soon or the public (who for the most part dont care about spectral analysis) will wonder what all the money was spent on.