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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]
Saturn – sixth planet from the Sun and the second-largest in the Solar System, after Jupiter. It is a gas giant with an average radius about nine times that of Earth . [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Although only one-eighth the average density of Earth, with its larger volume Saturn is just over 95 times more massive.
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 in shape due to its own gravity.
Saturn imaged in 2021 through a 6" telescope, dimly showing the polar hexagon. Saturn's polar hexagon was discovered by David Godfrey in 1987 [14] from piecing together fly-by views from the 1981 Voyager mission, [15] [16] and was revisited in 2006 by the Cassini mission.
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 planet in the Solar ...
The Great White Spot, also known as Great White Oval (named by analogy to Jupiter's Great Red Spot) is a series of periodic storms on the planet Saturn that are large enough to be visible from Earth by telescope by their characteristic white appearance. The spots can be several thousands of kilometers wide.
Pioneer 11 image of Saturn.. Saturn was first visited by Pioneer 11 in September 1979. It flew within 20,000 kilometres (12,000 mi) of the top of the planet's cloud layer. Low-resolution images were acquired of the planet and a few of its moons; the resolution of the images was not good enough to discern surface featu
The magnetosphere of Saturn is the cavity created in the flow of the solar wind by the planet's internally generated magnetic field. Discovered in 1979 by the Pioneer 11 spacecraft, Saturn's magnetosphere is the second largest of any planet in the Solar System after Jupiter .