Nasa what is saturn

It takes roughly another 30 years to generate the conditions for the next great storm. By the time Cassini dove into Saturn at the end of its mission, it had observed the planet for less than half of a Saturn year. But it had also orbited the gas giant times, forever changing our understanding of the Saturn system and yielding insight for understanding the entire solar system.

An enhanced-color, backlit view of Saturn. This spectacular, vertigo inducing, false-color image from NASA's Cassini mission highlights the storms at Saturn's north pole.

The angry eye of a hurricane-like storm appears dark red while the fast-moving hexagonal jet stream framing it is a yellowish green.

Low-lying clouds circling inside the hexagonal feature appear as muted orange color. A second, smaller vortex pops out in teal at the lower right of the image. The rings of Saturn appear in vivid blue at the top right. These Hubble Space Telescope images, captured from to , show Saturn's rings open up from just past edge-on to nearly fully open as it moves from autumn towards winter in its Northern Hemisphere.

JPL's lucky peanuts are an unofficial tradition at big mission events. Voyager 2 made its closest approach to Saturn on Aug. Saturn is the sixth planet from our Sun a star and orbits at a distance of about million miles 1. Saturn takes about But it might have a solid core somewhere in there. Saturn's atmosphere is made up mostly of hydrogen H 2 and helium He. Saturn has 53 known moons with an additional 29 moons awaiting confirmation of their discovery—that is a total of 82 moons.

Saturn has the most spectacular ring system, with seven rings and several gaps and divisions between them. Few missions have visited Saturn: Pioneer 11 and Voyagers 1 and 2 flew by; But Cassini orbited Saturn times from to Saturn cannot support life as we know it, but some of Saturn's moons have conditions that might support life.

Perhaps the most iconic of all the planets in our solar system, Saturn is heavily present in pop culture. And in the movie "Interstellar," the wormhole that enables the astronauts to travel to another galaxy appears near Saturn. The rings we see are made of groups of tiny ringlets that surround Saturn. Now we know those "handles" turned out to be the rings of Saturn. The Cassini spacecraft took this picture of Saturn's rings. You can see the grey and tan colors.

This is a picture of Saturn and its moons Tethys and Dione. Voyager 1 took this picture as it passed by. Full Moon Guide: October - November A new paper details how the hydrological cycle of the now-dry lake at Jezero Crater is more complicated than originally thought. This year, the minimum extent of Arctic sea ice dropped to 1. The lander cleared enough dust from one solar panel to keep its seismometer on through the summer, allowing scientists to study three big quakes.

Researchers will use Webb to observe 17 actively forming planetary systems. Scientists found evidence that an area on Mars called Arabia Terra had thousands of "super eruptions" over a million-year period. Full Moon Guide: September - October