Saturn, Saturn

Wind speeds on Saturn can reach 1,800 km/h, significantly faster than those on Jupiter. Saturn has a planetary magnetic field intermediate in strength between that of Earth and the more powerful field around Jupiter.

With an average orbital speed of 9.69 km/s, it takes Saturn 10,759 Earth days (or about 29 years), to finish one revolution around the Sun.

He wrote to the Duke of Tuscany that "The planet Saturn is not alone, but is composed of three, which almost touch one another and never move nor change with respect to one another. They are arranged in a line parallel to the zodiac, and the middle one (Saturn itself) is about three times the size of the lateral ones edges of the rings ." He also described Saturn as having "ears." In 1612 the plane of the rings was oriented directly at the Earth and the rings appeared to vanish. Mystified, Galileo wondered, "Has Saturn swallowed his children?", referring to the myth of the god Saturn eating his own children to prevent them from overthrowing him.

Using a telescope that was far superior to those available to Galileo, Huygens observed Saturn and wrote that "It [1] is surrounded by a thin, flat, ring, nowhere touching, inclined to the ecliptic." In 1675, Giovanni Domenico Cassini determined that Saturn's ring was composed of multiple smaller rings with gaps between them; the largest of these gaps was later named the Cassini Division. This division in itself is a 4,800 km wide region between the A Ring and B Ring.

North is up. Imaged by Cassini in 2006. The rings can be viewed using a quite modest modern telescope or with good binoculars. They extend from 6,630 km to 120,700 km above Saturn's equator, average approximately 20 meters in thickness, and are composed of 93 percent water ice with a smattering of tholin impurities, and 7 percent amorphous carbon.

While most of the moons in the Saturnian system are small in size, Titan is, relatively speaking, gigantic. After the Sun, the eight planets and Jupiter's moon Ganymede, Titan is the most massive object in the Solar System.

Unfortunately, during the flyby, the probe's turnable camera platform stuck for a couple of days, and some planned imaging was lost. Saturn's gravity was used to direct the spacecraft's trajectory towards Uranus.

Saturn appears to the naked eye in the night sky as a bright, yellowish point of light whose magnitude is usually between +1 and 0 and takes approximately 29 years to make a complete circuit of the ecliptic against the background constellations of the zodiac.

During the opposition of December 17 2002, Saturn appeared at its brightest due to a favorable orientation of its rings relative to the Earth.

Source: Wikipedia > Saturn