Saturn

 Saturn

Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second-largest in the Solar System, after Jupiter. It is a gas giant with an average radius of about nine and a half times that of Earth. It only has one-eighth the average density of Earth; however, with its larger volume, Saturn is over 95 times more massive. 

Information

Distance from Sun: 1.434 billion km

Orbital period: 29 years

Surface area: 42.7 billion km²

Radius: 58,232 km

Mass: 5.683 × 10^26 kg (95.16 M⊕)

Rotation period: 10 h 32 m 36 s; (synodic; solar day)

Moons: Titan, Enceladus, Mimas, Tethys, Dione, Iapetus, Hyperion, MORE

Colors

Saturn itself is made of ammonia ice and methane gas. The little dark spot on Saturn is the shadow from Saturn's moon Enceladus. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has provided images of Saturn in many colors, from black-and-white, to orange, to blue, green, and red.

Measurements

Saturn is about 75 thousand miles (120,000 km) in diameter and is almost ten times the diameter of Earth. About 764 Earths could fit inside Saturn. If you had a ball that was the size of a dime, Saturn would be a little bigger than a soccer ball.

Discovery date

1610

Learn more about the sixth planet in our solar system and its rings. 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.

Exploration

The exploration of Saturn has been solely performed by crewless probes. Three missions were flybys, which formed an extended foundation of knowledge about the system. The Cassini–Huygens spacecraft, launched in 1997, was in orbit from 2004 to 2017.