Giovanni Domenico Cassini

Giovanni Domenico Cassini (1625 to 1712) was an Italian-French mathematician, astronomer, astrologer and engineer, born in Perinaldo, near Imperia, at that time in the County of Nice, part of the Savoyard state. He discovered four satellites of Saturn and noted the division of its rings, later named the Cassini Division. He was also the first of his family to begin work on the project of creating a topographic map of France, and he created the first scientific map of the Moon. The Cassini space probe, launched in 1997, was named after him; it was the fourth probe to visit Saturn and the first to orbit it.