Saturn Research Paper

937 Words2 Pages

The ancient cultures like the Romans were the first to discover and name the planet Saturn but Galileo was the first to discover the rings in 1610 using his newly invented telescope. Bostiling a elegant ring system Saturn the sixth planet away from our sun at a distance of 1.4 billion kilometers. Saturn is second largest planet in the solar system and here on Earth is visible at night with the naked eye. Saturn has an overall hazy yellow-brown appearance from earth view but with a telescope people can see layers of cloud with little red, brown, and white spots.

Saturn is a gas-giant planet and has no solid surface but has a solid core and a thick layer of liquid. Saturn is mostly made of hydrogen and an outer layer of gas making it the least …show more content…

Saturn cannot support life but some of the moons might support humans and some can provided valuable information about our planet and solar systems past. Most moons are ice chucks less than 10 km in diameter but some moons like Titan and Tethys. Titan the largest moon of Saturn and the second largest in the solar system is the only moon that humans know about that has an atmosphere and clouds made of most nitrogen. The diameter of Titan is 5,150 km just under by 120 km to the largest moon humans know called Ganymede. The surface of Titan is composed of mostly hydrocarbons, ice and maybe methane and ammonia ice. There were ice volcanoes discovered on the surface from Huygens. There are lake and possibly rain and wind in a form of liquid methane and lots of dunes made of sand. Titan can give us a glimpse of what our planet looked like before evolution. Tethys is the same density of water and has a diameter of 1066. The moon rotates in a circular orbit of 294,660 km away from Saturn and is primarily pure water ice. There are two primary features of Tethys one being the Ithaca Chasma and the crater Odysseus. The Ithaca Chasma was created early in the life of the moon when the water expanded creating the chasm that makes up three quarter of the surface. The Odysseus crater is one of many crater impacts on the surface and this one measure 400 km across and contains a central

More about Saturn Research Paper

Open Document