Planet Saturn — Reading Comprehension Lesson

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Planet Saturn

Saturn is the sixth planet from the sun and the second largest planet in our solar system, after Jupiter. It is about nine times wider than Earth and has about 95 times Earth’s mass. Despite its enormous size, Saturn is the least dense planet in the solar system — its density is so low (about 0.69 grams per cubic centimeter) that it would float if placed in a large enough body of water. Like Jupiter, Saturn is a gas giant composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. It has no solid surface; the atmosphere gradually becomes denser and hotter with depth until it transitions into a liquid metallic hydrogen interior.

Saturn’s ring system is the most spectacular in the solar system. The rings extend up to 175,000 miles from the planet but are remarkably thin — typically only about 30 feet thick. They are composed of billions of particles of water ice and rock, ranging in size from tiny grains to chunks as large as a house. The rings are divided into several named groups separated by gaps, the largest of which is the Cassini Division, a 3,000-mile gap created by the gravitational influence of Saturn’s moon Mimas. Despite appearing solid from a distance, the rings are made of countless individual orbiting particles.

Saturn has at least 140 moons — more than any other planet in our solar system. The largest, Titan, is the second largest moon in the solar system and is bigger than the planet Mercury. Titan is the only moon known to have a dense atmosphere, composed mainly of nitrogen with clouds and lakes of liquid methane and ethane on its surface. The Cassini spacecraft, which orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017, and its Huygens probe, which landed on Titan in 2005, revealed Titan as a world with a complex weather cycle involving liquid hydrocarbons instead of water. Another moon, Enceladus, has geysers of water vapor and ice erupting from a subsurface ocean, making it a promising candidate for extraterrestrial life.

Saturn has powerful storms in its atmosphere. Its winds reach up to 1,100 miles per hour near the equator. Every 20 to 30 years, a massive storm called the Great White Spot erupts in Saturn’s northern hemisphere, forming a band of white clouds that eventually encircles the entire planet. Saturn also has a persistent hexagonal storm pattern at its north pole — a six-sided jet stream pattern about 20,000 miles across, stable enough to have been observed for decades. The Cassini mission, which ended in 2017 when the spacecraft deliberately dove into Saturn’s atmosphere, provided an enormous amount of data about the planet, its rings, and its moons.

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