Saturn

Saturn is probably the best known, and most beautiful planet in the Solar System. While its possession of a ring system is not unique, it has a set of rings which are far more extensive and more easily seen than that of any other planet. It is this ring system that makes Saturn so beautiful.

Saturn is the second largest planet in the Solar System, with a diameter of 120,000 kilometers. It orbits the Sun every 30 years, at a distance about ten times that of the Earth. The shape of the planet is a markedly oblate spheroid, with a polar diameter some ten percent smaller than that at the equator. Saturn is the least dense of all the planets, its mean density being only 0.7 times that of water.

Like Jupiter, Saturn is made mostly of hydrogen and helium. Its volume is 755 times greater that that of Earth. Winds in the upper atmosphere reach 500 meters (1,600 feet) per second in the equatorial region. (In contrast, the strongest hurricane-force winds on Earth top out at about 110 meters, or 360 feet per second.) These super-fast winds, combined with the heat rising from within the planet's interior, cause the yellow and gold bands visible in the atmosphere.