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Your 2012 Year in Space Calendar
  

Space Topics

Saturn


Saturn's yellow globe displays all the banding and storm activity of its larger brother, Jupiter, but these features of Saturn are upstaged by its dazzling rings. Saturn's rings are made of uncountable tiny particles in constant motion, forming waves and ringlets that spiral into and out from Saturn. Yet despite all this activity the rings maintain an incredibly flat plane, so thin that it disappears from Earth's view twice each Saturn year as Earth crosses Saturn's ring plane.

Saturn's many moons display a stunning variety. Titan, the second largest moon in the solar system, is an icebox Earth, with a thick atmosphere, methane meteorology, and youthful surface. Titan is accompanied by a tribe of icy globes: Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Titan, Hyperion, and Iapetus. Tiny bodies Telesto, Calypso, Helene, and Polydeuces lie in the dynamically stable Lagrange points of Tethys and Dione. Among and just outside the rings travel little lumpy bodies Pan, Daphnis, Atlas, Prometheus, Pandora, Janus, Epimetheus, and -- just outside Mimas -- Methone and Pallene. Beyond Iapetus are a slew of objects that are likely interlopers from the outer solar system captured by Saturn's gravity. Phoebe is by far the largest of these; it is accompanied by tiny Kiviuq, Ijiraq, Paaliaq, Skathi, Albiorix, Erriapo, Siarnaq, Tarvos, Mundilfari, Narvi, Suttungr, Thrymr, Ymir, and eleven more that do not yet have names.

Saturn has been explored by Pioneer 10 and 11, Voyager 1 and 2, and now the Cassini-Huygens mission. It is also frequently observed by the Hubble Space Telescope and many Earth-based observatories.

Saturn Numbers
Size: 2nd largest planet - 120,536 kilometers - 9.449 Earths
Orbit: 1,433,530,000 kilometers - 9.58 Earth orbits
Axial tilt: 26.73 degrees - 3.28 degrees more than Earth's
Number of moons: 61