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Performance Performance. Saturn is known for its amazing set of rings, but did you know that the occasionally disappear? Well, they disappear from our point of view anyway. The planet is tilted on its axis very similar to Earth. AS it makes its way along its 30 Earth year orbit of the Sun we sometimes see the rings full on and other time they are edge on from our perspective and disappear.
This will next happen in This is a rare occurrence. When Venus lies between the Earth and the Sun, a position known as "inferior conjunction", it makes the closest approach to Earth of any planet, lying at a distance of 41 million km during inferior conjunction.
At 'superior conjunction' when Venus is on the opposite side of the Sun and not visible to us she is about million kilometers from the Earth. The distance from Mercury to the Earth varies greatly as both planets orbit the Sun. At its closest approach, Mercury is about 77 million kilometers 48 million miles from Earth; at its furthest, about million kilometers million miles. As I write this 13 October , the distance is nearer to the lower end of the range, as Mercury will be at inferior conjunction in just ten days' time.
Thanks for your great question. Just a few weeks ago, the planet Mars was closer to the Earth than it has been in 60, years — maybe you saw it as the brightest thing in the sky besides the moon. Naturally, you might wonder how close the other planets get to earth, as well, and why the planets get closer and farther away at all. To find the closest distance between Saturn and Earth, we have to understand the orbit of each planet around the sun. Although we usually think of planets traveling in circles around the sun, they actually travel in an ellipse where the sun isn't exactly in the center.
You can draw a perfect ellipse yourself. Place a loop of string around two pins stuck through a piece of paper into a pice of cardboard. Use a pencil to keep the loop taut. If you move the pencil carefully, it should trace out an ellipse.
The pushpins are located at the 'foci' of the ellipse, which are two very special points. If the two 'foci' are at the same point, then you draw a circle. So circles are a special kind of ellipse, just as squares are a special type of rectangle. The sun is at the foci of planet orbits, which are always ellipses. A few particles are as large as mountains. The rings would look mostly white if you looked at them from the cloud tops of Saturn, and interestingly, each ring orbits at a different speed around the planet.
Saturn's ring system extends up to , miles , kilometers from the planet, yet the vertical height is typically about 30 feet 10 meters in the main rings. Named alphabetically in the order they were discovered, the rings are relatively close to each other, with the exception of a gap measuring 2, miles 4, kilometers in width called the Cassini Division that separates Rings A and B.
The main rings are A, B, and C. Rings D, E, F, and G are fainter and more recently discovered. Much farther out, there is the very faint Phoebe ring in the orbit of Saturn's moon Phoebe. Saturn took shape when the rest of the solar system formed about 4. About 4 billion years ago, Saturn settled into its current position in the outer solar system, where it is the sixth planet from the Sun. Like Jupiter, Saturn is mostly made of hydrogen and helium, the same two main components that make up the Sun.
Like Jupiter, Saturn is made mostly of hydrogen and helium. At Saturn's center is a dense core of metals like iron and nickel surrounded by rocky material and other compounds solidified by intense pressure and heat. It is enveloped by liquid metallic hydrogen inside a layer of liquid hydrogen —similar to Jupiter's core but considerably smaller.
It's hard to imagine, but Saturn is the only planet in our solar system with an average density that is less than water. The giant gas planet could float in a bathtub if such a colossal thing existed. The planet is mostly swirling gases and liquids deeper down.
The extreme pressures and temperatures deep inside the planet would crush, melt, and vaporize any spacecraft trying to fly into the planet. Saturn is blanketed with clouds that appear as faint stripes, jet streams, and storms. The planet is many different shades of yellow, brown, and gray. Winds in the upper atmosphere reach 1, feet per second meters per second in the equatorial region. In contrast, the strongest hurricane-force winds on Earth top out at about feet per second meters per second.
And the pressure — the same kind you feel when you dive deep underwater — is so powerful it squeezes gas into a liquid.
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