Solar Exploration

Saturn is instantly recognizable for its spectacular ring system — billions of chunks of ice and rock, ranging from dust grains to house-sized boulders, spread across a disk that spans hundreds of thousands of kilometers but is remarkably thin, in places barely 10 meters thick. Every gas giant has rings, but none rival Saturn's in brightness or scale.

Saturn is so light for its size that it's the only planet in the solar system less dense than water — if you could find an ocean big enough, Saturn would float. With well over 140 confirmed moons, it hosts one of the most varied moon systems anywhere, including Titan, the only moon in the solar system with a thick atmosphere, and Enceladus, an icy moon spraying water-ice geysers from a hidden subsurface ocean.

Like Jupiter, Saturn has no solid surface — its hydrogen and helium atmosphere deepens into a layer of liquid metallic hydrogen surrounding a rock-and-ice core roughly Earth-sized but many times more massive. Powerful winds near the equator reach up to 1,800 km/h, and a persistent hexagonal jet-stream pattern swirls at its north pole, a six-sided storm system unlike anything else observed on another planet.