![]() ![]() The day Saturday was named after Saturn. Atlas, the second of Saturns known satellites, orbits near the outer edge of the A-ring and is about 40 by 20 kilometers (25 by 15 miles) in size.The Ringed Planet is so far away from the Sun that it receives much less sunlight than we do here on Earth.A day on Saturn is 10 hours and 14 minutes. A year on Saturn is more than 29 Earth years. Saturn goes around the Sun very slowly.That's 1,118 miles per hour! On Earth, the fastest winds "only" get to about 400 kilometers per hour. Winds around the equator can be 1,800 kilometers per hour. Saturn could float in water because it is mostly made of gas.Image above: The planet is named after Saturn. Saturn's rings are the only ones that can be seen from Earth. Yet, they are less than a kilometer thick. The main rings could almost go from Earth to the moon. 7 Glorious Rings Saturn has the most spectacular ring system, with seven rings and several gaps and divisions between them. Some are up to a kilometer (more than half-a-mile) across. Saturn has 53 known moons with an additional 29 moons awaiting confirmation of their discoverythat is a total of 82 moons. Some are much larger than tall buildings. Some of these bits are as small as grains of sand.That would take a really big bath tub! Credit: NASA Image above: Saturn is the only planet that could float in water. They are made up of bits of ice, dust and rock. The potato-shaped moon is about 26.8 miles (43.1 kilometers) in mean radius, orbiting Saturn at a distance of 87,000 miles (139,000 kilometers), taking 14.7 hours to go around the planet. This is the same kind of gas that you put in balloons. The density of Prometheus has been estimated to be low it is probably a porous, icy body. Jupiter is the only planet that is bigger. It is the second largest planet in our Solar System. Here are some fun facts about the Ringed Planet. Saturn has 124 moons, according to the Solar System Dynamics team at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Image above: Earth can fit across Saturn nine times. They have been wondering about it for thousands of years. Humans have been gazing up at Saturn for a long time. Because heat shows up as red and yellow, it looks a lot like a Pac-Man that’s just about to chow down on the Herschel Crater.Īnd that’s just one more reason that everybody loves Mimas.Saturn is sometimes called "The Jewel of the Solar System." It is a planet that is nothing like our own. Why yes! In 2010, Cassini’s heat-detecting equipment (a composite infrared spectrometer) identified a V-shaped range of hot surface on the moon’s left side. Titan Mean diameter: 3,200 miles (5,150 kilometers) The largest of Saturn's moons and the first to be discovered is Titan. Thanks to its low density, we think it’s mostly ice.Īny other pop-culture references we should know about? The Herschel Crater sprawls across one-third of the moon’s face, about 81 miles, and its outer walls are more than three miles high! The impact could have destroyed Mimas, according to some scientists. They cover Mimas’s surface, making it one of the most crater-pocked things in our solar system. It is an icy world whose surface is completely obscured by a golden hazy atmosphere. The orbit around Saturn takes about 23 hours - exactly half the time it takes Tethys, a sister moon. (Earth’s moon averages about 239,000 miles from us.) Its orbit is elliptical, but Mimas’s averages a distance from Saturn of about 125,000 miles. Its face is smaller than 250 miles across. But we got a really good look in 2010, when NASA’s Cassini explorer started sending back high-quality images of this, the smallest and closest of Saturn’s seven moons. In 1980, NASA’s Voyagers I and II spacecraft sent back some fuzzy shots of Mimas. Mimas is especially popular with sci-fi fans because its massive Herschel Crater - named for English astronomer William Herschel, who discovered this moon in 1789 - makes Mimas look kind of like the Death Star from Star Wars. But as many new moons were discovered scientists began selecting names from more mythologies, including Gallic, Inuit and Norse stories. ![]() No, not the Greek Titan whose legs were snakes, but Mimas the moon of Saturn - which was named after that mythical character. Moons of Saturn were originally named for Greco-Roman Titans and descendants of the Titans. ![]()
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