Facts About Saturn, the Ringed Planet

What kind of planet is Saturn?

Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second-largest, after Jupiter. Like Jupiter, it's a gas giant, made mostly of hydrogen and helium, with no solid surface. NASA's size comparison: if Earth were the size of a nickel, Saturn would be about as big as a volleyball.

Saturn is the farthest planet you can easily see without a telescope, a steady, pale-yellow point of light. It's named after the Roman god of farming and wealth, who in myth was Jupiter's father.

Saturn by the numbers

Source: NASA Planetary Fact Sheet and NASA Science.

Saturn has the second-shortest day of any planet, under 11 hours. Its year is almost 30 Earth years, so it has seasons, each lasting about seven Earth years, because its axis is tilted like Earth's.

How big is Saturn compared with Earth?

NASA says Saturn is about 9 times wider than Earth. By volume, using the NASA Planetary Fact Sheet, about 760 Earths could fit inside it. Yet Saturn has only about 95 times Earth's mass, because so much of it is light hydrogen gas. That's why its gravity at the cloud tops is close to Earth's, and why it would float.

Saturn's rings

Saturn's rings are the most spectacular in the solar system. NASA says they're made of billions of chunks of ice and rock coated with dust, from tiny grains to pieces as big as houses, with a few as big as mountains. They probably formed from pieces of comets, asteroids or moons that were torn apart by Saturn's gravity.

The rings are huge and incredibly thin. The main rings stretch up to about 282,000 kilometers from the planet, but they're typically only about 10 meters (30 feet) thick. If you made a model with rings as thin as a sheet of paper, they would have to be about 3 kilometers wide.

Astronomers name the rings with letters in the order they were discovered. From the planet outward: D, C, B, A, F, G and E. The bright A and B rings are separated by the Cassini Division, a dark gap about 4,700 kilometers wide that looks empty from Earth but actually holds thinner ring material.

Because Saturn is tilted, we see its rings from different angles over its 29-year orbit. Every 14 to 15 years they line up edge-on with Earth and almost disappear in small telescopes. In the 3D view, rotate the camera to see the rings face-on and edge-on.

What's inside Saturn?

Tap the cutaway in the diagram:

1. Cloud tops: pale yellow and tan bands in an atmosphere of hydrogen and helium, where equator winds reach about 500 meters per second (1,800 kilometers per hour).
2. Liquid hydrogen: deeper down, the gas gets thicker and hotter until hydrogen becomes liquid.
3. Metallic hydrogen: deeper still, hydrogen is squeezed into a metal-like liquid that creates Saturn's magnetic field, 578 times as powerful as Earth's.
4. Core: a dense center of iron and nickel wrapped in rock, crushed by heat and pressure.

Saturn is the only planet less dense than water. Most of its huge volume is light hydrogen gas.

The hexagon at the north pole

At Saturn's north pole, a jet stream of wind forms a giant six-sided shape, about 30,000 kilometers across, with a spinning storm in the middle. Voyager spotted it in the 1980s, and the Cassini spacecraft studied it up close. Winds in the hexagon blow at about 320 kilometers per hour. Scientists think the shape comes from the way waves form in the jet stream.

Titan, Enceladus and 291 more

NASA counts 293 confirmed moons for Saturn as of August 2026, the most of any planet. Many are only a few kilometers wide. Two are among the most interesting places in the solar system:

• Titan is bigger than the planet Mercury and the only moon with a thick atmosphere. Under its orange haze are rivers, lakes and seas, but they're filled with liquid methane and ethane, not water. NASA's Dragonfly rotorcraft is being built to fly from place to place on Titan.
• Enceladus is small and bright white. It sprays jets of water vapor and ice grains into space from an ocean hidden under its icy shell. Cassini flew right through the spray.

Both moons have hidden oceans that scientists think could possibly support life. Other notable moons include Mimas, with one giant crater, and Iapetus, which is dark on one side and bright on the other.

Missions to Saturn

• Pioneer 11 made the first flyby in 1979, followed by Voyager 1 (1980) and Voyager 2 (1981).
• Cassini orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017. It dropped the European Huygens probe onto Titan in 2005, the farthest landing ever made, and ended its mission by diving into Saturn on September 15, 2017.

Fun facts about Saturn

• If you weigh 80 pounds on Earth, you'd weigh about 73 pounds at Saturn's cloud tops, because its gravity is close to Earth's.
• Galileo saw something odd around Saturn in 1610 but couldn't tell they were rings; Christiaan Huygens figured it out in the 1650s.
• Saturn's winds are about four times faster than the strongest hurricane winds on Earth.
• A spacecraft diving into Saturn would be crushed, melted and vaporized long before reaching the center.

Learning about Saturn at home

Make a ring model: punch a planet-sized hole in a paper plate and slide it onto a foam ball, then tilt it to see why the rings sometimes look thin from Earth. Take the facts quiz above and print the labeled Saturn diagram.

Next, compare Saturn with Jupiter and Uranus, or see it orbit in the 3D solar system.