Saturn
(more details below)
Saturns largest moon - Titan
Size & Distance
* Saturn has a diameter of 72,366 miles.
* It is also 9 times wider than the Earth.
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* Is 886 million miles from the Sun.
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* It takes light 80 minutes to travel from the Sun to Saturn.
Geology
* Saturn is made mostly of hydrogen and helium (a bit like Jupiter).
* It's center is a dense core of metals like iron and nickel surrounded by rocky material and other compounds solidified by intense pressure and heat. It is enveloped by liquid metallic hydrogen inside a layer of liquid hydrogen –similar to Jupiter's core but considerably smaller.
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* Saturn has an average density that is less than water (unlike any planet in our solar system). This huge gas like planet could float in water if you could find a tub big enough to put it in.
Atmosphere / Weather
* It has a covering of clouds that appear as faint stripes, jet streams, and storms. The planet is many different shades of yellow, brown, and gray.
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* Winds in the upper atmosphere reach 1,600 feet per second (500 meters per second) in the equatorial region. In contrast, the strongest hurricane-force winds on Earth top out at about 360 feet per second (110 meters per second).
* The pressure – the same kind you feel when you dive deep underwater – is so powerful it squeezes gas into a liquid.
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* Saturn's north pole has an interesting atmospheric feature – a six-sided jet stream. This hexagon-shaped pattern was first noticed in images from the Voyager I spacecraft and has been more closely observed by the Cassini spacecraft since. Spanning about 20,000 miles (30,000 kilometers) across, the hexagon is a wavy jet stream of 200-mile-per-hour winds (about 322 kilometers per hour) with a massive, rotating storm at the center. There is no weather feature like it anywhere else in the solar system.
Orbit & Rotation
* Saturn has the second-shortest day in the solar system. One day on Saturn takes only 10.7 hours (the time it takes for Saturn to rotate or spin around once).
* Saturn makes a complete orbit around the Sun (a year in Saturnian time) in about 29.4 Earth years (10,756 Earth days).
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* Its axis is tilted by 26.73 degrees with respect to its orbit around the Sun, which is similar to Earth's 23.5-degree tilt. This means that, like Earth, Saturn experiences seasons.
credit - NASA
