The Planets- Saturn 2

In the early 1980s, NASA's two Voyager spacecraft revealed that Saturn's rings are made mostly of water ice, and they found "braided" rings, ringlets, and "spokes" - dark features in the rings that seem to circle the planet at a different rate from that of the surrounding ring material. Some of the small moons orbit within the ring system as well. Material in the rings ranges in size from a few micrometers to several tens of meters.

Saturn has 34 known natural satellites (moons) and there are probably many more waiting to be discovered. The largest, Titan, is a bit bigger than the planet Mercury. Titan is shrouded in a thick nitrogen-rich atmosphere that might be similar to what Earth's was like long ago. Further study of this moon promises to reveal much about planetary formation and, perhaps, about the early days of Earth as well.

In addition to Titan, Saturn has many smaller icy satellites. From Enceladus, which shows evidence of surface changes, to Iapetus, with one hemisphere darker than asphalt and the other as bright as snow, each of Saturn's satellites is unique.

Saturn, the rings, and many of the satellites lie totally within Saturn's enormous magnetosphere, the region of space in which the behavior of electrically charged particles is influenced more by Saturn's magnetic field than by the solar wind. Images taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope show that Saturn's polar regions have aurorae similar to Earth's Northern and Southern Lights. Aurorae occur when charged particles spiral into a planet's atmosphere along magnetic field lines.


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