Saturn

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Saturn
Saturn’s northern hemisphere, as taken by the Hubble Space Telescope on July 4, 2020.
Discovery Data
Discovered By	Antiquity
Discovered On	Antiquity
Physical Characteristics
Diameter	120536 km
Mass	95.16 of Earth’s
Density	0.69 g/cm3
Number of Moons	146
Volume	763 of Earth’s
Axial Tilt	26.7°
Albedo	0.5
Rotational Period	10.7 hours
Temperature	-178°C
Atmospheric Data
Atmospheric Composition	95.5% hydrogen 2.5% helium 0.35% methane 0.009% ammonia
Orbital Characteristics
Orbital Period	29.4475 years
Semi-Major Axis	9.58 AU
Perihelion	9.04 AU
Aphelion	10.123 AU
Escape Velocity	35.5 km/s
Eccentricity	0.0565
Inclination	26.73°

Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun. It is the second largest planet in the Solar System, along with having the most moons of any planet. Saturn is most famous for its complex ring system, which is made mostly of ice chunks and crystals. Its biggest moon is Titan, the only moon to possess a defined atmosphere.

Atmosphere

The atmosphere of Saturn is extremely dense and thick. In fact, the atmosphere makes up about 45% of Saturn itself. The atmosphere stretches downward from the purplish-blue, hexagon-shaped northern pole. The atmosphere stretches down about forty five percent of the way to the core of Saturn itself. Below the atmosphere is metallic hydrogen and molten rock.

The atmosphere is mainly consists of hydrogen and helium. The rest include phosphorus, germanium, carbon, ammonia, and other trace elements.

Orbit and Rotation

Saturn is about 9 times the distance from the sun than the Earth. Therefore it takes much longer to orbit the Sun than the Earth, taking approximately twenty-nine years to orbit the sun.

Saturn is a Jovian planet/one of the gas giants, therefore it rotates on its axis much faster than the inner rocky planets. Saturn takes approximately 10 hours and 30 minutes to make one rotation on its axis. Since Saturn rotates on its axis extremely quickly, this causes the planet to distort its shape. Saturn distorts at the poles and bulges toward the equator.

Rings

Main article: Rings of Saturn

The rings of Saturn, as taken by Voyager 2.

Saturn's ring system is the most complex, most massive and largest of all of the rings of the other gas giants in the Solar System. The rings of Saturn encircle the entire planet at exactly the equator. The rings measure about 288,000 kilometers in diameter, yet measure about ~47.5 meters in thickness, about half the length of a US football field.

It is theorized that Saturn's rings formed from a former satellite around 100 million years ago when a large asteroid destroyed the moon and caused it to get obliterated and shatter into a ring. The leftover debris from this impact also clumped together to form Tethys and Enceladus.

Because the rings are so thin, every 14 ~ 15 years, when Saturn periodically turns its rings edge on Earth, the rings can actually visibly disappear when viewed with a small telescope. This event is referred to as a "Ring Plane Crossing".

The rings of Saturn are not composed of just one ring, as suggested by Huygens, but actually made up of three main rings: The A, B, and C rings (also known as the Crepe ring). The A ring is the ring farthest from the planet of Saturn, though the recently discovered F ring is supposedly farther from the planet than the A ring. The A ring consists of the smaller rock particles, such as those as small as marbles. The whitest and brightest ring is the closer B ring. This ring contains chunks of ice the size of houses and buildings. The A and B rings are separated by the Cassini Division, a 4800-kilometer wide gap between these two rings created by gravitational influences, or resonances with Saturn's moons. The ring closest to Saturn is the faintest ring, the C-ring, also known as the Crepe ring, due to it representing a nearly transparent fabric known as crepe ring.

Moons

Saturn has 146 moons with known orbits; 66 of them have received permanent designations, and 63 have been named. Most of them are quite small. Seven moons are large enough to be in hydrostatic equilibrium, including Titan, the second largest moon in the Solar System. Including these large moons, 24 of Saturn's moons are regular, and traditionally named after Titans or other figures associated with the mythological Saturn. The remaining 122 are irregular, and classified by their orbital characteristics into Inuit, Norse, and Gallic groups, and their names are chosen from the corresponding mythologies the groups are named after. The rings of Saturn are made up of icy objects ranging in size from one centimeter to hundreds of meters, each of which is on its own orbit about the planet. Thus a precise number of Saturnian moons cannot be given, as there is no objective boundary between the countless small anonymous objects that form Saturn's ring system and the larger objects that have been named as moons. At least 150 "moonlets" embedded in the rings have been detected by the disturbance they create in the surrounding ring material, though this is thought to be only a small sample of the total population of such objects.

Saturn during Ring Crossing Event

Formation

Saturn's core formed as a clump of rocky material and particles that remained from the formation of the Sun and Jupiter. Saturn's core was a super-earth about 10 times Earth's mass.

However, because of the abundance of gaseous materials scattered everywhere in the Solar System, Saturn's gravitational pull attracted huge amounts of particles and gas that led to the thickening of its atmosphere, eventually becoming a Jovian gas giant.

Discovery

Saturn was first observed by people in the prehistoric times. It was first explored along with neighboring planet, Jupiter, by Galileo Galilei. Galileo made the first observations that rings existed around Saturn. He observed something (Saturn's rings) around the planet. However, he could not identify them because his telescope (known back then as a spyglass), was not powerful enough to spot these rings. It was not until seventeen years later that a Dutch astronomer named Christian Huygens would later use a more powerful telescope to discover that Saturn was surrounded by a ring system.

Exploration

4 spacecraft have visited Saturn, being 3 flybys, and 1 orbiter. Under this is a list of all missions to Saturn.

Flybys

Spacecraft Name	Closest Approach	Day of Approach
Pioneer 11	21,000 kilometers	September 1, 1979
Voyager 1	126,000 kilometers	November 12, 1980
Voyager 2	42,000 kilometers	August 25, 1981

Orbiters

Spacecraft Name	Date of Approach	Date of Mission End	Closest Approach
Cassini-Huygens	June 30, 2004	September 15, 2017	20,000 kilometers?

Gallery

See Also

• Rings
• Jupiter
• Fifth Giant
• Rhea