3/31/2023 0 Comments Planet ring menu![]() In addition to Titan, Saturn has many smaller "icy" satellites. Further study of this moon promises to reveal much about planetary formation and, perhaps, about the early days of Earth as well. ![]() Titan is shrouded in a thick nitrogen-rich atmosphere that might be similar to what Earth's was like long ago. The largest, Titan, is a bit bigger than the planet Mercury. Saturn has 31 known natural satellites (moons). Material in the rings ranges in size from a few micrometers to several tens of meters. Some of the small moons orbit within the ring system as well. In the early 1980s, NASA's two Voyager spacecraft revealed that Saturn's rings are made mostly of water ice, and they found "braided" rings, ringlets and "spokes" - dark features in the rings that seem to circle the planet at a different rate from that of the surrounding ring material. ![]() In fact, Saturn and its rings would just fit in the distance between Earth and the Moon. Saturn's ring system is the most extensive and complex in our solar system it extends hundreds of thousands of kilometers from the planet. (In contrast, the strongest hurricane-force winds on Earth top out at about 110 meters per second.) These super-fast winds, combined with heat rising from within the planet's interior, cause the yellow and gold bands visible in its atmosphere. Winds in the upper atmosphere reach 500 meters per second in the equatorial region. Its volume is 755 times greater than Earth's. It is made mostly of hydrogen and helium. Like Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune, Saturn is a gas giant. ![]() Image to right: Voyager 2 was able to capture Saturn's true color during its' mission in the early 1980s. In 1675, Italian-born astronomer Jean Dominique Cassini discovered a gap between what are now called the A and B rings. In 1659, Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens announced that this was a ring encircling the planet. To his surprise, he saw a pair of objects on either side of the planet, which he later drew as "cup handles" attached to the planet on each side. In 1610, Italian Galileo Galilei was the first astronomer to gaze at Saturn through a telescope. Saturn is the most distant of the five planets known to ancient stargazers. ![]()
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