What would it be like to fly through Saturn’s rings?

Saturn’s rings are one of the most beautiful sights in the Solar System, but most of us have no idea what they look like up close. The most famous pictures of the rings are from hundreds of millions of miles away, at a distance where the rings appear stately and still, like a delicate piece of jewelry locked up inside a display case. 

If you were to fly through the rings of Saturn, though, you would see something very different. There are giant needles of ice, rippling waves, and massive smash-ups spraying out debris. Instead of a single beautiful object, you would see varied, alien landscapes, including some that host entire worlds in themselves. 

Icy twilight

Start at one of the rings closest to Saturn. If you were drifting just above it, you would look down at a field scattered with what looks like dust, pebbles, and boulders the color of wet pavement. Turn to one side, and the massive pale gold face of Saturn would take up almost the entire sky, striped with clouds and spotted with storms. Turn the other way, and you would see the Sun as a tiny dot, though it would still be too bright to stare at. Our star would light up the rings about as much as twilight during a clear day on Earth.

The ring beneath you would be only a few meters thick — in most places, you could see through it to the glittering stars on the other side. Though the fragments within would look rocky, most of it is actually ice. Tiny crystals, about as fine as powdered sugar, would coat the bigger chunks and drift in the spaces between them.

Almost everything would be still. The larger pieces of the ring below would orbit Saturn at the same speed as you, so they would not look like they are moving. Finer bits of ice would seem to randomly drift at about the same speed that an ant crawls. If your eyes are good enough to see more than one kilometer (0.6 miles) away, you might spot bits of ice drifting at about walking speed in the distance.

Weirdly, Saturn would appear to rotate in the opposite direction as those chunks. Within minutes, some of its clouds would shift noticeably before your eyes.

Waves, mountains, and moonlets

Imagine you begin to fly away from Saturn, toward the more distant rings. Beneath you, the field of ice would occasionally rise upward, thickening by a factor of several into a broad plateau striped with narrow gaps. Other times, you would fly over narrow bands (called ringlets) with almost nothing around them.

At some point, the ice would begin to lighten from the color of wet pavement to that of snow in shade. The sparse field of the ring you were just in, called the C ring, would give way to ripples of ice, each tens of meters wide and a few meters tall. As you watched, these ripples would shift slightly underneath you, fading and reforming like waves on the surface of the ocean. This is the B ring. 

Why is it called the B ring, and why does C come before B?

Saturn’s rings are named after the order they were discovered in, not their distance from the planet. Older telescopes were not able to resolve the thousands of individual rings around Saturn, so they mistook entire groups of rings for a single ring.

If you looked back, Saturn would take up less space in the sky, and you would have a harder time noticing details on its surface or the fact that they are moving. But if you looked ahead, you would eventually see another marvel: giant spikes of ice, towering up to 3.5 kilometers (2.2 miles) above the horizon. These mountains are caused by large clumps of ice, called moonlets, orbiting nearby. Their gravitational pull interacts with the ring material to compress the ice and force it upward. 

Mind the gaps

Assuming you cleared the tops of the spikes, you would continue over a couple of large gaps before arriving in the A ring. Here, the fields of ice you flew past would be thicker, up to about 30 meters (98 feet), and the gaps between bands would be narrower. Some parts of the ring would look like gently rolling hills, becoming more tightly packed as you traveled on. Over a few particular belts, you would also see countless little propeller-shaped disturbances. These kinks are also caused by moonlets, likely too small to see unless you flew right over them. 

So far out from Saturn, several of the planet’s largest moons would now be visible in the surrounding sky. Some would range from the size of tiny pinpricks to about as large as the Moon looks from Earth, depending on whether each moon happened to be on the same side of Saturn as you. Others would be a more constant sight: Titan would stay roughly half as big as a full Moon looks to us, for instance. Compared to that, Saturn would still stretch about 100 times broader across the sky.

One of your best views of any moon would come as you approached the edge of the A ring. First, the field of ice below you would begin to ripple upward. Then you’d clear it entirely, flying over a sharp transition into a gap wider than the Grand Canyon. 

There, you would pass by Saturn’s moon Daphnis. It would look something like a gray oblong walnut, about one thousand times bigger than the ring around it is thick. Daphnis’ gravitational pull causes ripples in the gap’s edge on either side, which can reach up to 1.5 kilometers (0.93 miles) high.

Spirals and silhouettes

After the A ring (and another gap about as wide as all of Europe), you would arrive at a messy stream of ice twisting beneath you and casting off strands and spirals of tiny particles. As you watched, you might see new jets of debris spray out from the ring as clumps and moonlets within it smash into each other. This is the F ring.

If you flew over the right part of it, you would see two moons flanking the F ring on either side. These are Prometheus and Pandora, each about as wide as Mount Etna and covered in craters, ridges, and valleys. Prometheus is known as a shepherd of the F ring, helping keep the particles inside it contained. 

There are more rings around Saturn after the F ring, if you kept flying on, but they would be fainter and harder to appreciate with the naked eye. 

Instead, a fitting grand finale would be to wait for Saturn’s equinox. For a handful of months every 15 years, the rings angle edge-on to the Sun, and many of the structures described above would stand out in stark relief. Tall structures like the rings’ spikes would cast extremely long, dramatic shadows, while the silhouettes and shade of moons and rings would play across the surface of Saturn. 

Some of these shadows you can see for yourself through a powerful enough telescope. For everything else, you will have to use your imagination — or wait for the next mission to Saturn.