Welcome to Saturn!
You have reached stop #7 on Plymouth PTA’s Mission: Planet Exploration, a driving tour of the solar system designed to scale based on a 6-foot sun at Plymouth Elementary School! Click on Mission: Planet Exploration for more info, including a map to all 8 planets.
Image Credit: NASA
The Beautiful Ringed Planet
Saturn is the 2nd largest planet and is known for it’s beautiful rings made of chunks of ice and rock. There appear to be 7 main rings with hundreds, if not thousands, of ringlets around Saturn with gaps between the rings. The rings are made of chunks of ice and rock that range in size from “too tiny to see” to the size of a school bus. (Actually, all the four outer planets have rings—all the other ones are just much harder to see.)
Saturn is a gas giant, like Jupiter. Remember how we said you wouldn’t want to fly a spacecraft into Jupiter because it would vaporize? Well, in 2017, NASA intentionally vaporized a spacecraft named Cassini in Saturn’s atmosphere! Cassini had been on a 20-year space voyage, spending 13 years studying Saturn. When Cassini ran out of fuel, scientists decided to vaporize the spacecraft so it wouldn’t accidentally damage any of Saturn’s moons. You can learn more about Cassini here.
More kid-friendly facts about Mercury can be found at the NASA Science Space Place.
More in-depth information about Mercury can be found at NASA Science Solar System Exploration.