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Rings of Saturn. The full set of rings, imaged as Saturn eclipsed the Sun from the vantage of the Cassini orbiter, 1.2 million km (¾ million miles) distant, on 19 July 2013 (brightness is exaggerated). Earth appears as a dot at 4 o'clock, between the G and E rings. The rings of Saturn are the most extensive and complex ring system of any ...
Ring system. The moons Prometheus (right) and Pandora (left) orbit just inside and outside, respectively, the F ring of Saturn, but only Prometheus is thought to function as a shepherd moon. A ring system is a disc or torus orbiting an astronomical object that is composed of solid material such as gas, dust, meteoroids, planetoids or moonlets ...
Enceladus orbiting within Saturn's E ring. Plumes from Enceladus, which are similar in composition to comets, [25] have been shown to be the source of the material in Saturn's E ring. [23] The E ring is the widest and outermost ring of Saturn (except for the tenuous Phoebe ring).
Saturn's hexagon. A partial view of Saturn's north pole, 2016. Saturn's hexagon is a persistent approximately hexagonal cloud pattern around the north pole of the planet Saturn, located at about 78°N. [1][2][3] The sides of the hexagon are about 14,500 km (9,000 mi) long, [4][5][6][7] which is about 2,000 km (1,200 mi) longer than the diameter ...
Mimas imaged by the Cassini orbiter, February 2010. Mimas's surface is dominated by craters; the large crater at the right is Herschel. Mimas, also designated Saturn I, is the seventh-largest natural satellite of Saturn. With a mean diameter of 396.4 kilometres or 246.3 miles, Mimas is the smallest astronomical body known to be roughly rounded ...
September 18, 2024 at 1:43 AM. Earth may briefly have had a ring system similar to Saturn ’s over 450 million years ago during a period of unusually intense meteorite bombardment, a new study ...
The Day the Earth Smiled is a composite photograph taken by the NASA spacecraft Cassini on July 19, 2013. During an eclipse of the Sun, the spacecraft turned to image Saturn and most of its visible ring system, as well as Earth and the Moon as distant pale dots. The spacecraft had twice taken similar photographs (in 2006 and 2012) in its ...
Saturn is named after the Roman god of wealth and agriculture, who was the father of the god Jupiter.Its astronomical symbol has been traced back to the Greek Oxyrhynchus Papyri, where it can be seen to be a Greek kappa-rho ligature with a horizontal stroke, as an abbreviation for Κρονος (), the Greek name for the planet (). [35]