Saturn
Saturn, also known as the Ringed Giant for its stunning set of rings, is the third outermost planet in our Solar System. It joins Neptune, Uranus, and Jupiter as one of the giant planets. Giant planets are unimaginably huge, stunningly beautiful, and sometimes a little weird. They are made mostly of gases instead of solid materials.
Characteristics of Saturn
Saturn & Jupiter
A Gas Giant
The largest planets in our solar system, Saturn and Jupiter are made up mostly of hydrogen and helium. They rotate fast and have strong winds and storms. Because they are so massive, temperatures and pressures deep within them increase to extraordinary levels. Hydrogen takes on a liquid metallic form. The nature of their rocky cores remains a mystery.
Hexagonal Polar Vortex
The Cassini spacecraft took detailed images of Saturn’s oddly shaped north polar vortex through four different filters. Unlike on Earth, where winds blow around the poles in a circular pattern, Saturn’s north polar vortex is shaped like a hexagon! It has persisted for at least many decades.
Rings
Saturn has a massive ring system. Seen edge on, Saturn’s thin rings almost seem to disappear. But viewed from above or below, they present a scene of dramatic beauty unique in our solar system. Saturn’s rings are made of billions of fragments of mostly ice and some rock. They range in size from dust particles to large boulders. A few bodies may be as large as two-thirds of a mile (one kilometer) across. The rings are named with letters in the order they were discovered. They are separated in places by narrow gaps. The gravity of small nearby moons influences the appearance and structure of the rings. Called shepherding satellites, these tiny moons help form clumps, bends, and braids in the rings.
Moons
Saturn has 62 moons. The Voyager spacecraft revealed the moons of the giant planets to be surprisingly diverse worlds in their own right. Further exploration has unveiled intricate surfaces both young and old, volcanoes and impact features, huge plumes and geysers, deep canyons, subsurface oceans, and even clues to possible environments that might be friendly to simple forms of life. The moons of Jupiter and Saturn are not dead, unchanging worlds. Several show evidence of geologic activity throughout their history. Complex patterns, faulting, cliffs, and deep canyons tell stories of stresses and resurfacing that have shaped and reshaped the terrain. Explore some of Saturn's moons in the gallery below.
Exploring Saturn's Moons
Titan
Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is an ocean world with a dense atmosphere, abundant complex organic material on its icy surface, and a liquid-water ocean in its interior. The Cassini-Huygens mission revealed Titan to be surprisingly Earth-like, with active geological processes and opportunities for organic material to have mixed with liquid water on the surface in the past. These attributes make Titan a unique destination to seek answers to fundamental questions about what makes a planet or moon habitable and about the pre-biotic chemical processes that led to the development of life here on Earth. NASA's upcoming Dragonfly New Frontiers mission is a rotorcraft lander designed to perform long-range in situ investigation of the chemistry and habitability of this fascinating extraterrestrial environment.
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Enceladus
An icy moon of Saturn, Enceladus has a bright surface and large areas with few craters. This smoother terrain is young, having been resurfaced in recent geologic time. Deep cracks near the south pole, often called “tiger stripes,” are vents for huge plumes of water vapor. The plumes of Enceladus are fed by a global ocean, 6 miles (10 kilometers) beneath the moon’s icy crust. The existence of this ocean makes Enceladus an intriguing site for the search for life in our solar system.
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Titan
Larger than the planet Mercury, Saturn’s moon Titan is the only moon in our solar system with a substantial atmosphere. Mostly nitrogen and methane, its foggy air blocks Titan’s surface from view. Beneath the haze, long river valleys have been carved by liquid hydrocarbons (methane and ethane) that fill large lakes.
