Saturn

Happy Halloween – who says the boys and girls at NASA have no sense of humor

Relative Size of Planets

Planetary Fact Sheet – Planet Comparisons t/index.html t/index.html

Size comparison, rocky planets and moons.

True Saturn – from Cassini Spacecraft

Saturn: just the basic facts Saturn, like Jupiter, is made mostly of hydrogen and helium. Winds in the upper atmosphere reach 500 meters per second in the equatorial region. In contrast, the strongest hurricane-force winds on Earth top out at about 110 meters (360 feet) per second.

Saturn: just the basic facts 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 day length is 10.7 hours. Saturn’s year is 29.7 Earth years. It has an escape velocity of over 80,000 miles per hour (Earth’s is 25,000 miles/hour).

Saturn: just the basic facts 568,319,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg – In Sci. Notation: x kg – Earth’s mass: X kg. Its volume is 755 times greater than that of Earth. Distance from the sun: 1.43 billion km, or 9.58 AU. Surface Gravity – if you weigh 100 lbs on Earth, you would weigh 107 lbs on Saturn.

Saturn’s Rings In the early 1980s, Voyager 1 & 2 revealed that Saturn's rings are made mostly of water ice – from fine grains to chunks as large as a house. Also, they imaged "braided" rings, ringlets, and "spokes.“ – dark features in the rings that form and initially circle the planet at different rates from that of the surrounding ring material.

The Rings Saturn and several of its moons hold the whole jumble together in a powerful gravitational grip. Moons like Pan, Atlas and Pandora are called shepherd moons - they herd particles into Saturn's rings. The moons also create gaps and twisting wave patterns.

Cassini Composite of Saturn’s Rings

The Rings Saturn's ring system extends hundreds of thousands of kilometers from the planet, yet the vertical height is typically about only 10 meters (30 feet) in the main rings. This is a JPL illustration of Saturn’s Rings

The Rings During Saturn's 2009 autumnal equinox, when sunlight illuminated the rings edge-on, Cassini spacecraft images showed vertical formations in some of the rings. – particles seem to pile up in bumps or ridges more than 3 kilometers (2 miles) tall.

Why Study Saturn’s Rings? Why are Saturn’s rings more than just beautiful? According to a number of things I read, the rings are kind of like a model of the early solar system. "The small moons embedded in the rings close into Saturn interact with the rings, [which] is similar to the interactions that likely occurred in the early solar system itself.“

Why Study Saturn’s Rings? "The moons sweep up and sculpt the rings and release ring material. They create waves and establish resonances in the rings. And so studying the rings is like studying the early solar system and the formation of the planets.” Dr. Amanda Hendrix, a planetary scientist with NASA.

Titan Saturn has 53 known moons and Titan is by far the largest. With an equatorial radius of 2,575 km (1,600 miles), Titan is the second largest moon in our solar system. – It is larger than Mercury and only Jupiter’s moon Ganymede is larger (slightly larger).

Titan’s Atmosphere The temperature at Titan's surface is about degrees Fahrenheit (-178 degrees Celsius). Titan is of great interest because it has clouds and a thick atmosphere, which extends farther out into space than Earth’s. – Most of its atmosphere is Nitrogen (like Earth’s) with methane the second most common substance.

Titan’s Hydrocarbons Titan and Earth are the only two objects in our solar system with large amounts of organic compounds. Titan's organic materials, including deposits of methane and other hydrocarbons, are as large as some of the Great Lakes – Earth’s hydrocarbons have been cycled through living organisms, Titan’s haven’t (pristine).

Titan’s Smog Problem Due to Titan’s gaseous hydrocarbons, it has smog. – Sunlight, like here on Earth, breaks hydrocarbon compounds into pieces that react with each other and nitrogen to form organic compounds. – Those include ethane, acetylene, hydrogen cyanide, cyanoacetylene and other familiar terrestrial chemicals (that we consider serious air polluntants).

An Impression of Titan’s Surface from Hyugen’s Data

Possible Life on Titan? Recent research has provided fascinating hints that liquid water may exist deep under Titan's surface. Titan's seafloor may be similar to areas of Earth's seafloor where hydrothermal vents exist. These passageways into Earth's interior spout hot, mineral-rich water that fosters an array of once-unknown forms of life.

Seasons Change on Titan

BBC Cassini-Hyugens Probe Documentary vmM vmM

An unrequited mission After Cassini-Hyguens, there was urgency to launch a follow up mission (to “sail Titan’s methane seas”). O10Q O10Q