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    Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second largest.

    Saturn is composed mostly of hydrogen. Its atmosphere has a brownish hue, and its markings are muted by high-altitude haze. Saturn is the least dense of the planets; its specific gravity (0.7) is less than that of water.

    Saturn is about 75% hydrogen and 25% helium with traces of water, methane, ammonia and "rock", similar to the composition of the primordial Solar Nebula from which the solar system was formed.

    Saturn's interior is similar to Jupiter's consisting of a rocky core, a liquid metallic hydrogen layer and a molecular hydrogen layer. Traces of various ices are also present.

    Saturn has been known since prehistoric times. Galileo was the first to observe it with a telescope in 1610; he noted its odd appearance but was confused by it. Early observations of Saturn were complicated by the fact that the Earth passes through the plane of Saturn's rings every few years as Saturn moves in its orbit. A low resolution image of Saturn therefore changes drastically. It was not until 1659 that Christian Huygens correctly inferred the geometry of the rings. Saturn's rings remained unique in the known solar system until 1977 when very faint rings were discovered around Uranus and shortly thereafter around Jupiter and Neptune).

    
    
    
    
    Visiting Saturn
    Three American spacecraft have visited Saturn. Pioneer 11 sped by the planet and its moon TITAN in September 1979, returning the first close-up images. Voyager 1 followed in November 1980, sending back breathtaking photographs that revealed for the first time the complexities of Saturn's ring system and moons. Voyager 2 flew by the planet and its moons in August 1981.

    The Voyagers discovered new moons and found several satellites that share the same orbit. We learned that some moons sheperd ring particles, maintaining Saturn's rings and the gaps in the rings. Saturn's 18th moon was discovered in 1990 form images taken by Voyager 2 in 1981.

    Voyager 1 determined that Titan has a nitrogen-based atmosphere with methane and argon -one more like Earth's in composition than the carbon dioxide atmospheres of Mars and Venus. Titan's surface temperature of -179 degrees Celsius (-290 degrees Fahrenheit) implies thatthere might be water-ice islands rising above oceans of ethane-methane liquid or sludge. Unfortunately, Voyager's cameras could not penetrate the moon's dense clouds.

    Continuing photochemistry from solar radiation may be converting Titan's methane to ethane,acetylene and - in combination with nitrogen - hydrogen cyanide. The latter compound is abuilding block of amino acids. These conditions may be similar to the atmospheric conditions ofprimeval Earth between three and four billion years ago. However, Titan's atmospheric temperature is believed to be too low to permit progress beyond this stage of organic chemistry.

    The exploration of Saturn will continue with the Cassini mission. Scheduled for launch in the latter part of the 1990's, the Cassini mission is a collaborative project of NASA, the European Space Agency, and the federal space agencies of Italy and Germany, as well as the United States Air Force and the Department of Energy. Cassini will orbit the planet and will also deploy a probe called Huygens, which will be dropped to peer through Titan's clouds and will spend years examining the Saturnian system.

    
    
    
    Saturn's Rings
    Two prominent rings (A and B) and one faint ring (C) can be seen from the Earth. The gap between the A and B rings is known as the Cassini division; the much fainter gap in the A ring is known as the Encke Gap. The Voyager pictures show four additional faint rings. Saturn's rings, unlike the rings of the other planets, are very bright.

    Though they look continuous from the Earth, the rings are actually composed of innumerable small particles each in an independent orbit. They range in size from a centimeter o r so to several meters. A few kilometer-sized objects are also likely. Saturn's rings are extraordinarily thin: though they're 250,000 km or more in diameter they're no more than 1.5 kilometers thick.

    Despite their impressive appearance, there's really very little material in the rings -- if the rings were compressed into a single body it would be no more than 100 km across. The ring particles seem to be composed primarily of water ice, but they may also include rocky particles with icy coatings. Voyager confirmed the existence of puzzling radial inhomogeneities in the rings called "spokes" which were first reported by amateur astronomers. Their nature remains a mystery, but may have something to do with Saturn's magnetic field. Saturn's outermost ring, the F-ring, is a complex structure made up of several smaller rings along which "knots" are visible. Scientists speculate that the knots may be clumps of ring material, or mini moons. The strange braided appearance visible in the Voyager 1 images is not seen in the Voyager 2 images perhaps because Voyager 2 imaged regions where the component rings are roughly parallel.

    There are complex tidal resonances between some of Saturn's moons and the ring system: some of the moons, the so-called "shepherding satellites" are clearly important in keeping the rings in place; Mimas seems to be responsible for the paucity of material in the Cassini division, which seems to be similar to the Kirkwood gaps in the asteroid belt; Pan is located inside the Encke Gap. The whole system is very complex and as yet poorly understood.

    The origin of the rings of Saturn (and the other jovian planets) is unknown. Though they may have had rings since their formation, the ring systems are not stable and must be regenerated by ongoing processes, probably the breakup of larger satellites.

    The rings are composed of countless low-density particles orbiting individually around Saturn's equator at progressive distances from the cloud tops. Analysis of spacecraft radio waves passing through the rings showed that the particles vary widely in size, ranging from dust to house-sized boulders. The rings are bright because they are mostly ice and frosted rock.

    The rings may have resulted when a moon or passing body ventured too close to Saturn. The unlucky object would have been torn apart by great tidal forces on its surface and in its interior. Or the object may not have been fully formed to begin with and disintegrated under the influence of Saturn's gravity. A third possibility is that the object was shattered by collisions with larger objects orbiting the planet.

    Unable either to form into a moon or to drift away from each other, individual ring particles appear to be held in place by the gravitational pull of Saturn and its satellites. These complex gravitational interactions form the thousands of ringlets that make up the major rings.

    Radio emissions quite similar to the static heard on an AM car radio during an electricl storm were detected by the Voyager spacecraft. These emissions are typical of lightning but are believed to be coming from Saturn's ring system rather than its atmosphere, where no lightning was observed. As they had at Jupiter, the Voyagers saw a version of Earth's aurorae near Saturn's poles.

    
    
    
    
    NEWS ARTICLES
    Saturn: Astronomers admire 'Lord of the Rings' BBC News - February 2002


    Color Clue in Saturn's Rings

    June 5, 2001 - BBC

    Composite images of Saturn's rings, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, have revealed mysterious colours that suggest they could be made of material from the outer solar system.

    The images, captured between 1996 and 2000, show Saturn's rings at their most wide-open, allowing astronomers to look into them and determine their properties.

    Composed of myriads of small chunks of rock and ice, their origin has always been puzzling: they were thought to be either a shattered moon or material that never got to form a moon at all.

    The new observations suggest that they may be the remnants of a shattered body from the most distant parts of the Solar System.

    Complex molecules

    "The colour of the ring material can help tell us what the rings are made of and will help decipher their origin," said Dr. Jeff Cuzzi, of Nasa.

    "Most people don't know that Saturn's rings aren't white but have a faint salmon colour, which hints that a few percent of complex organic molecules are mixed in with the water ice the rings are mostly made of," he added.

    The observation that is intriguing astronomers is that, unlike the rings, Saturn's seven small icy moons do not have a reddish colour. However, many icy objects in the distant, frozen outer reaches of the outer solar system do.

    This had led some scientists to speculate that, unlike its moons, the rings were formed from an outer solar system object that broke up when it passed too close to Saturn.

    To make the composite image over 100 Hubble images were analysed in eight different colours that cover, and go beyond, the range of human vision. They include violet, blue, green and red in the visible range and ultra-violet and infrared in the non-visible range.

    As well as casting light on the origin of the rings. the observations have shown researchers just how little they understand Saturn's ring system.

    Detailed analysis suggests that there may be at least two unknown materials mixed with the rings' water ice, and that the way these materials are distributed in the rings is unlike anything seen on the surfaces of nearby planets or their moons.

    The Hubble data also shows that the ring colour changes with viewing angle. The best explanation, says Dr Francois Poulet of Nasa, is that the ring particles are actually aggregates of particles, with many more deep shadows than the relatively smooth surface of a moon. The rings appear redder as more shadows are seen.

    Astronomers are looking forward to a much closer view of Saturn in a few years' time when the Cassini spacecraft, which recently passed Jupiter, reaches the ringed planet in 2004.


    Four New Moons Found for Saturn

    October 26, 2000 - Reuters - Washington

    Astronomers said on Thursday they had found four new moons orbiting Saturn, giving the ringed planet more known moons than any other in the solar system.

    This gives Saturn a total of 22 known moons, one more than the 21 seen orbiting Uranus. Little is known about the four new moons except for their brightness and that they are orbiting at more than 9 million miles (15 million km) from the surface of the giant planet.

    They are probably tiny, the team at Cornell University in New York say -- between 6 and 30 miles (10 and 50 km) across. They look like faint dots of light moving around the planet.

    The researchers, led by professors of astronomy Joseph Burns and Philip Nicholson, plan to tell a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Pasadena, California that they may have found other possible moons orbiting Saturn as well.


    Oily ocean found on Saturn's moon

    Impression of probe landing on Titan

    July 29, 1999 - BBC Online

    The best images ever taken of Saturn's mysterious moon Titan reveals a complex surface that may be home to icy landforms and frigid hydrocarbon seas. They would be the only known open oceans in the solar system, other than on Earth.

    The new image of Titan may show bright continent and dark seas

    Astronomers from the US Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the University of California have captured the images using the world's largest telescope, the Keck reflector on Hawaii.

    Sharper than those obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope, the Keck images show dark regions that may be seas of liquid hydrocarbons, as well as bright regions that may be ice-and-rock continents or highlands.

    Secrets of life

    Titan is 5,120 kilometres (3,200 miles) in diameter, larger than the planet Mercury and is the only body in the solar system with a nitrogen-rich atmosphere like the Earth's. Being 900 million miles from the Sun, Titan is much colder than Earth, with a surface temperature of minus 180 degrees Celsius (-290 F).

    Titan as seen by Voyager

    Scientists believe that Titan could be one of the most important objects for scientific scrutiny in the entire solar system as it may contain some of the secrets of the beginning of life.

    The new observations confirm that Titan is chemically rich. It contains many of the molecules that were on the Earth before life arose on our planet.

    When the Voyager spacecraft passed by in 1980, it saw only the orange-brown top of Titan's smoggy skies. Now using the Keck telescope scientists can get a more detailed view.

    "With the tremendous power of the Keck Telescope we are able to map surface features 150 miles in size on a moon that is more than 800 million miles from Earth. I find this tremendously exciting to think about," said Claire Max of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory

    The twin Keck Telescopes

    These models give the first quantitative map of Titan's surface. The bright region shaped somewhat like a rubber duck seems to be made of a mixture of rock and ice," astrophysicist Seran Gibbard added.

    A kidney-shaped region near the left edge of that image is made of an extremely dark material. Scientists have long suggested that ethane smog could condense and rain onto Titan's surface as a black liquid.

    The dark material could be a sea of liquid methane, ethane or other hydrocarbons," Livermore's Bruce Macintosh said. "It's one of the darkest things in the solar system. It could also be solid organic material."

    Either possibility is exciting to scientists. If it is a sea, it represents the only such open body of liquid known beyond planet Earth.

    Using this information it is possible to imagine standing on Titan's frozen surface.

    The ground beneath your feet would have the reddish colour that dominates everything around you. As you look towards the horizon you would see undulating hills of ice with dark red and yellow peaks and rivulets of ochre on their flanks.

    
    
    
    
    MYTHOLOGICAL SATURN
    Saturn, in Roman mythology, ancient god of agriculture. In later legends he was identified with the Greek god Cronus, who, after having been dethroned by his son Zeus (in Roman mythology, Jupiter), fled to Italy, where he ruled during the Golden Age, a time of perfect peace and happiness. Beginning on December 17 of each year, during the festival known as the Saturnalia, the Golden Age was restored for seven days. All business stopped and executions and military operations were postponed. It was a period of goodwill, devoted to banquets and the exchange of visits and gifts.

    A special feature of the festival was the freedom given to slaves, who during this time had first place at the family table and were served by their masters.

    Saturn was the husband of Ops, goddess of plenty. Besides Jupiter, who was ruler of the gods, Saturn's children also included Juno, goddess of marriage; Neptune, god of the sea; Pluto, god of the dead; and Ceres, goddess of the grain. In art Saturn is usually shown bearded, carrying a sickle or an ear of corn.

    
    
    

    METAPHYSICAL SATURN ASTROLOGY

    Saturn rules Capricorn.

    Saturn means responsibilities.

    Saturn indicates where we are bound to learn, the narrowness that makes our way felt, the walls that make homes possible. Saturn holds us together as much as apart. Saturn, the ringed planet, shows us our boundaries and limits and where and how we need to take responsibility in life.

    Saturn cycles last 28 to 30 years. Saturn is the planet of obstacles and restrictions but it can also bring in the most important learing lessons of your life.

    At age 28-30 everyone goes through "Saturn Return" wherein they take a long hard look at their lives and make major changes. This repeats again at age 56-58. These areas affect career, relationships, relocations, schooling among other things.

    We have just dealt with planets that we can see with our naked eyes. In general, these planets refer to life as we know and live it, and are the so-called historical or classic planets. Beyond these are three planets that are not visible to the naked eye and which have cycles longer than the average human life span.

    Since they are beyond Saturn or time, astrologers call them the transpersonal or transcendental planets - the planets beyond the physical. One of the ways astrologers learn something about our life beyond time (eternal life) is through these three outer planets: Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. Here we find information on how we discover ourselves (Uranus), how we understand and accept these discoveries. (Neptune), and, in time, how we depend and identify with them (Pluto).

    
    
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