- Distance
- 9.5 AU
- Diameter
- 116,460 km
- Year
- 29.4 years
- Day
- 10 h 34 m
- Moons
- 146+
About Saturn
Saturn's rings are made of countless chunks of water ice, from dust grains to house-sized boulders, spread across 280,000 km yet typically only tens of metres thick. The planet itself is the least dense in the Solar System. A strange hexagonal jet stream sits over its north pole. Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is bigger than Mercury and has a thick nitrogen atmosphere with lakes of liquid methane. Tiny Enceladus sprays water from an underground ocean into space through geysers at its south pole. The Cassini spacecraft orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017.
- Least dense planet: 0.69 g/cm³
- Rings span 280,000 km but are extremely thin
- Titan is the only moon with a dense atmosphere
Moons
| Name | Diameter | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|
 | Titan | 5,150 km | Saturn's largest moon and the only moon with a thick atmosphere. Rivers, lakes and seas of liquid methane and ethane flow on its surface at −180 °C. The Huygens probe landed there in 2005 and Dragonfly will fly a rotorcraft over it in the 2030s. |
 | Enceladus | 504 km | A small, brilliantly white moon that shoots plumes of water vapour and ice from a subsurface ocean at its south pole, feeding Saturn's E ring. |
| Rhea | 1,527 km | Saturn's second largest moon, an icy, cratered world with a thin oxygen and carbon-dioxide atmosphere. | |
| Iapetus | 1,470 km | A two-tone moon: one hemisphere is dark as coal, the other bright ice. A ridge of mountains runs around its equator. | |
 | Mimas | 396 km | Dominated by the crater Herschel, which gives it a striking resemblance to the Death Star. |
In pictures
