Saturn
By: Dyani Chock and Kaya Umeda
How it got it’s name
• Saturn is named for the Roman god of
agriculture. The Greek equivalent was Cronos,
father of Zeus/Jupiter.
• Other civilizations have given different names to
Saturn, which is the farthest planet from Earth
that can be observed by the unaided human eye.
General Information
• Saturn was the most distant of the five planets known to
the ancients.
• In 1610, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei was the first to
gaze at Saturn through a telescope.
– To his surprise, he saw a pair of objects on either side of the
planet. He sketched them as separate spheres, thinking that
Saturn was triple-bodied.
– Continuing his observations over the next few years, Galileo
drew the lateral bodies as arms or handles attached to Saturn.
• In 1659, Dutch astronomer
Christiaan Huygens, using a
more powerful telescope than
Galileo's, proposed that Saturn
was surrounded by a thin, flat
ring.
• In 1675, Italian-born astronomer
Jean-Dominique Cassini
discovered a division between
what are now called the A and B
rings.
• Like Jupiter, Saturn is made mostly of hydrogen and
helium. Its volume is 755 times greater than that of
Earth. Winds in the upper atmosphere reach 500 m
(1,600 feet) per second in the equatorial region.
– These super-fast winds, combined with heat rising from
within the planet's interior, cause the yellow and gold
bands visible in the atmosphere.
Saturn’s Rings
• In the early 1980s, NASA's Voyager 1 and Voyager 2
spacecraft revealed that Saturn's rings are made
mostly of water ice, and they imaged "braided" rings,
ringlets and "spokes" -- dark features in the rings that
circle the planet at different rates from that of the
surrounding ring material.
• Saturn's ring system extends hundreds of thousands
of kilometers from the planet, yet the vertical depth is
typically about 10 m (30 feet) in the main rings.
Saturn’s Rings
• There are billions of ring particles in the entire ring system.
• The ring particle sizes range from tiny, dust-sized icy grains
to a few particles as large as mountains.
• Two tiny moons orbit in gaps (Encke and Keeler gaps) in
the rings and keep the gaps open.
• Other particles (10's to 100's of meters) are too tiny to see
but create propeller-shaped objects in the rings that let us
know they are there.
• Saturn’s rings are believed to be pieces of
comets, asteroids or shattered moons that
broke up before they reached the planet.
– Each ring orbits at a different speed around the
planet.
• While the other three gas planets in the solar system Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune - have rings orbiting around
them, Saturn's are by far the largest and most spectacular.
– With a thickness of about 1 kilometer (3,200 feet) or less, they
span up to 282,000 km (175,000 miles), about three quarters of
the distance between the Earth and its moon.
Rings: A, B, C, and the Cassini
Division
• The main rings are, working
outward from the planet,
known as C, B, and A. The
Cassini Division is the
largest gap in the rings and
separates Rings B and A.
– The Cassini Divisiona is a
gap measuring 4,700
kilometers (2,920 miles).
Other Rings
• In addition a number of fainter rings have been discovered
more recently.
• The D Ring is exceedingly faint and closest to the planet.
• The F Ring is a narrow feature just outside the A Ring.
• Beyond that are two far fainter rings named G and E.
• The rings show a tremendous amount of structure on all
scales; some of this structure is related to gravitational
perturbations by Saturn's many moons, but much of it
remains unexplained.
Works Cited
• "Exploring The Planets - Saturn." Smithsonian National Air and Space
Museum. Web. 03 Mar. 2011. <http://www.nasm.si.edu/etp/saturn/>.
• "Planets: Saturn: Rings." Solar System Exploration. Web. 10 Mar. 2011.
<http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=Saturn&Displa
y=Rings>.
• "Saturn L Saturn Facts, Pictures and Information." The Nine Planets Solar
System Tour. Web. 03 Mar. 2011. <http://nineplanets.org/saturn.html>.
• "Saturn." Views of the Solar System. Web. 03 Mar. 2011.
<http://www.solarviews.com/eng/saturn.htm>.