What are the rings of Saturn

made of and how is it

observed?

Victoria Pan
Brief Introduction
• The 6th planet from Sun

• Second largest planet in the Solar System

• Gas Giant: like Jupiter, Saturn is a massive ball made mostly of

hydrogen and helium.
Something Special – Rings!
• The only planet to have rings

• Pieces of comets, asteroids, or shattered moons that broke up before they

reached the planet, torn by Saturn’s powerful gravity

• They are made of small chunks of ice and dust: the sizes of the ring particles
range widely, from dust-sized icy grains to chunks as big as a house. A few
particles are as large as mountains.

• Each ring orbits at a different speed around the planet

Rings in details
• The main rings, working out from the planet, are known as C, B and A. The
innermost is the extremely faint D ring. It is so big that it could fit a billion Earths
within it. The Cassini Division, a gap some 4700 km wide, separates rings B and A.

• Saturn’s F is composed of several narrower rings, and bends, kinks and bright
clumps in them can give the illusion that these strands are braided.

• The rings are named alphabetically in the order they were discovered

• The largest ring spans 7000 times than the diameter of the planet. The main rings
are typically only about 9 meters thick
 A long time ago…
• Galileo Galilei was the first one to discover the Rings, using his normal
telescope

• In 1655, Christiaan Huygens proposed that Saturn had a flat, thin ring

• Four robotic spacecraft from Earth have visited Saturn—Pioneer 11,

Voyager 1, Voyager 2 and Cassini.
Cassini-Huygens: the unique spacecraft
• Cassini was the first spacecraft to look at Saturn and its system in
details, named after Giovanni Cassini.

• Two major challenges to Cassini’s development:

• - at the beginning, the mission had a $3.3 billion price tag, which
was very high during the 1990s
• - some environmental groups were afraid that the “radioisotope
thermoelectric generator” would threat the Earth
Cassini-Huygens: the unique spacecraft
• The spacecraft was launched on October 15, 1997.

• Cassini hadn’t head to Saturn until July 1, 2004; because it had other missions
involving other planets.

• One of its prime objective is to find out what caused Saturn’s Rings and the colors
in the rings.

• The spacecraft landed on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon on January 14, 2005. The
Huygens lander sent information back to Earth for nearly 2.5 hours during its
descent.
Cassini-Huygens: the unique spacecraft
• What did the spacecraft discover:
• -Finding evidence of liquid water on Enceladus, one of the moons
• -Finding more details about a giant methane lake on Titan
• - A close-up view of Rhea
• - A huge ring, 8 million ways away from Saturn, is likely made up of
debris from Phoebe
Cassini-Huygens: the unique spacecraft
• Every week between Nov. 30, 2016, and April 22, 2017, Cassini did
loops around Saturn's poles to look at the outer edge of the rings, to
learn more about their particles, gases and structure. It also observed
small moons in this region, including Atlas, Daphnis, Pan and Pandora.

• Cassini was originally slated to last four years at Saturn, until 2008,
but its mission has been extended multiple times. I
The End
• The Cassini spacecraft orbited Saturn from June 30, 2004, until Sept.
15, 2017, when the probe ended its life with a plunge into the ringed
planet’s atmosphere.

• This intentional death dive was performed to make sure Cassini never
contaminated a potentially habitable Saturn moon.
Conclusion

•It is an extraordinary thing to learn

about Saturn and its rings. We can know
more about the Solar System in general
and find potentially useful resources
from Saturn.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
• “In Depth.” NASA, NASA, solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/saturn/in-
depth/#rings_otp.
• Choi, Charles Q. “Saturn: Facts About the Ringed Planet.” Space.com,
Space, 13 May 2019,
www.space.com/48-saturn-the-solar-systems-major-ring-bearer.html.
• Coffey, Jerry. “Why Does Saturn Have Rings.” Universe Today, 24 Dec.
2015, www.universetoday.com/84129/why-does-saturn-have-rings/.