Saturn

Saturn's rings have always baffled astronomers.

As a two-stage vehicle, the saturn i had full orbital capability for a variety of payloads.

Saturn? How we doing in the relay room?

As you know, it's believed that Saturn and all the planets in our solar system, coalesced from a swirling cloud of gas some 4.8 billion years ago.

But Saturn’s rings, most of them anyway, are pristine, so bright and shiny that they make Saturn “the jewel of the solar system”.

Saturn’s rings are much younger than the planet itself.

Now, if material from Saturn’s rings is being lost, and nothing new is added from time to time, the rings would be disappearing, but that’s not happening.

The moons, the dozens of moons, they all orbit Saturn, are providing raw material for the rings.

A moon in the system is complex at Saturn’s, and Saturn has at least 49 known moons which vary tremendously in size and shape.

Then there are tidal forces, a moon might get too close to the planet and get broken apart by Saturn's tidal forces.

Well, by tidal force, I'm referring to the gravitational pull of Saturn on its moons.

So if one of Saturn's moons reaches the Roche limit of the planet, or even a larger moon, it would disintegrate, be torn apart and thus add more material to the ring system.

And there's another way new material might be added to the Saturn's rings, an asteroid crashing into one of the moons.

Remember, the rest of Saturn's rings are made almost entirely of water ice.

And none of Saturn's moons is red.

Cuz it seem to me like the only exoplanets we ever hear about are gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn that couldn't possibly support carbon-based life.

The planets, in order of their distance from the Sun, are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. Under the control of the Sun's gravitational force, each planet maintains an elliptical orbit and all of them travel in the same direction.

Then Jupiter’s right there at 5-point something, and then Saturn is about 10 astronomical units from the Sun.

One of the outer planets, Saturn, has a density of only 0.7 that of water, which means that Saturn would float in water.

Until about 30 years ago, we thought the rings were composed of particles of ice and rock that were left over from Saturn’s formation, extra material that never managed to form er...er coalesce into a moon.

For more than 300 years we thought Saturn was the only body in the solar system with rings.