SATURN

BY:BRANDON

What Saturn looks like

• It’s a big planet and it haves a ring around it and sometimes it turns neon and glow in the dark

Why you cant live on Saturn

• You can not live on this planet because there is no food no cars no animals nothing is there where you can live off of.

INFO

• The rings are about 400,000 kilometers (240,000 miles) wide. That's the distance from the Earth to the Moon! But the rings are as little as 100 meters (330 feet) thick. They range from particles too tiny to see to "particles" the size of a bus. Scientists think they are icy snowballs or ice covered rocks.

• There are actually many rings—maybe 500 to 1000. There are also gaps in the rings.

Saturn's history and naming

• Saturn's History and Naming• Saturn was the Roman name for Cronus, the

lord of the titans in Greek mythology. Saturn happens to be the root of the English word "Saturday.

Physical Characteristics of the Planet Saturn

• Saturn is a gas giant made up mostly of hydrogen and helium. Saturn is the second largest planet, big enough to hold more than 760 Earths, and is more massive than any other planet except Jupiter,

• Saturn is the farthest planet from Earth visible to the naked human eye. The yellow and gold bands seen in the planet's atmosphere are the result of super-fast winds in the upper atmosphere, which can reach up to 1,100 miles per hour 1,800 kilometers per hour around its equator, combined with heat rising from the planet's interior.

• Saturn actually has many rings made of billions of particles of ice and rock, ranging in size from a grain of sugar to the size of a house. The rings are believe to be debris left over from comets, asteroids or shattered moons. Although they extend thousands of miles from the planet, the main rings are typically only about 30 feet thick. Cassini revealed vertical formations in some of the rings, with particles piling up in bumps and ridges more than 2 miles (3 kilometers) high.

• The first spacecraft to reach Saturn was Pioneer 11 in 1979, flying within 13,700 miles (22,000 kilometers) of it, which discovered the planet's two of its outer rings as well as the presence of a strong magnetic field. The Voyager spacecraft discovered the planet's rings are made up of ringlets, and sent back data that led to the discovery or confirmation of the existence of nine moons.

• Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is slightly larger than Mercury, and is the second-largest moon in the solar system behind Jupiter's moon Ganymede. Titan is veiled under a very thick, nitrogen-rich atmosphere that might be like what Earth's was long ago, before life. While the Earth's atmosphere extends only about 37 miles (60 kilometers) into space, Titan's reaches nearly 10 times as far.

• As the most massive planet in the solar system after Jupiter, the pull of Saturn's gravity has helped shape the fate of our system. It might have helped violently hurl Neptune and Uranus outward. It, along with Jupiter, might alos have slung a barrage of debris toward the inner planets early in the system's history.