Paragraph on “Saturn and its Rings” complete paragraph for Class 9, Class 10, Class 11 and Class 12

Saturn and its Rings

Saturn is the sixth planet, in order of revolution, in the family of the Sun. It has a diameter of 1,20,536 kilometres and is located in orbit about 1427 million kilometres away from the Sun. Saturn is about 95 times larger and has a surface gravity of 1.16 as compared to Earth. Moving at a speed of 9.6 kilometres per second it takes about 30 years to complete one revolution around the Sun and takes 10 hours and 39 minutes to complete one rotation on its axis. It has 23 moons which revolve around it. Because of its distance from the sun, Saturn is a cold planet and the temperatures on surface vary from —180° to —292° Centigrade. Saturn is one of the four planets which have rings around it as shown in the illustration. These rings, made of millions of fragments of rocks coated with ice, surround this distant planet. It is not confirmed how these rings were formed but it is assumed that these rings are fragments of moons which broke apart and were suspended around the planet millions of years ago. Saturn’s rings are about 22 times bigger than Earth’s diameter, they are however only a few kilometres thick. Some of the rings have a larger number of frozen rock clusters as a result of which more light gets reflected which in turn explains why the rings are of different colours.

One of the moons circling this planet is the largest satellite known to man, it is the moon called ‘Titan’. It has a diameter of 5120 km and is bigger than both Pluto and Mercury. Saturn is the second fastest rotating planet next to Jupiter. It is only in the last few decades that we have come to know a lot about Saturn. This was made possible through visits to Saturn by unmanned spacecraft sent from Earth. Saturn was first visited by the unmanned Pioneer XI space probe in 1979 and subsequently in 1986 by the Voyager I and Voyager II space probes. Both the space probes sent back invaluable pictures of the planet.