EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT SATURN

Saturn is our Solar System’s ringed wonder – a spectacular world encircled by planes of icy debris, giving it a unique appearance. But there’s a lot more to Saturn than just its rings; this enormous world is worth exploring both for its own complexity and the fascinating family of satellites that orbit it. As the most distant Solar System object easily seen with the naked eye, Saturn orbits at an average of 1.43 billion kilometres (887 million miles) from the Sun. Its slow orbit means that Saturn takes 29.5 years to make a full circuit through the constellations of the zodiac; it was this stately movement that led ancient stargazers to associate it with the father of Jupiter in Roman mythology.

Its distance makes it a challenging object for study, even in the era of giant telescopes. Most of what we know about the planet comes from the Voyager probe flybys in the 1980s and the Cassini mission that orbited between 2004 and 2017. Earth observations, coupled with close-up images from these explorers, have