Saturn is a gassy planet that is impossible to land on. Like all the other Gas Giants, astronauts would sink right though! From the Sun, Saturn is the sixth planet and the second largest. Much of what we know about this strange planet is due to Voyager explorations. The first spacecraft to visit Saturn was NASA's Pioneer 11 in 1979 and then Voyagers 1 and 2.

Between 1980 and 1981, scientists discovered a wavy pattern on one of the rings and we don't know what it is. Voyager has proven the existence of invisible inhomogenities, called spokes. The layers of Saturn's gases get deeper and become a hot liquid. As it gets deeper, it turns metallic and molten. Below that, only the core, with traces of ice! Saturn's gravitational pull is only 0.7, less than water! Saturn's core is much like Jupiter's: rocky with a liquid metallic hydrogen layer. Saturn's rings are chunks of asteroids, mainly containing ice, rock, and dust. The rings of the planet are actually rather thin: less than 1 kilometer thick. The rotation of Saturn takes about 10 hours and the orbital period takes about 29 years. The Northern Hemisphere, strangely, is blue, more like Neptune.

In early October, 2004, Cassini got the greatest picture of Saturn that we know of! Saturn, surprisingly, is so far away from the sun, it gives off more energy than it  receives from the sun. Saturn is visibly oblate if you look at it with a small telescope, but the other gas giants are oblate, but not as much as Saturn. Scientists have been puzzled for almost 400 years, until recently, because apparently the rings of Saturn have disappeared dramatically. Almost 400 years later, they realized that the Earth was in a view where it couldn't see the rings. Of all the moons in our solar system, Jupiter has the most, but Saturn is second: more than 34 moons.

Saturn's rings were rather unique until scientists discovered rings on Jupiter, Neptune, and Uranus. The distance from the Sun to Saturn would be about 1,429,400,000 in kilometers. Sometimes you will see Saturn turn on it's side. Saturn recently had a huge storm, storms like this are rare, yet possible. From a telescope it looked like a tiny white dot. Saturn's day is only 10 hours and 39 minutes long!
 
 

Credits:

 http://www.solarviews.com/eng/solarsys.htm Picture
 http://www.nineplanets.org/overview.html
http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/nineplanets/nineplanets/saturn.html