Saturn: A Portrait with Moons

Welcome to a 3D virtual gallery you can walk through in your browser, exploring Saturn's rings and moons. Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun, a gas giant over 95 times more massive than Earth, orbited by at least 293 moons.

One of those moons, tiny Enceladus, only 500 kilometres across, shoots geysers of water vapour and ice into space at over 2,000 km/h. More than 100 geysers feed Saturn's E ring. Beneath its frozen crust lies a salty ocean perhaps 26 kilometres deep.

Cassini's Thirteen-Year Vigil

The Cassini spacecraft orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017, transforming our knowledge of the entire system. It discovered Enceladus's water plumes, measured the rings' mass by flying between them and the cloud tops, and revealed a vast hexagonal storm pattern around Saturn's north pole. It was deliberately plunged into Saturn's atmosphere to protect potentially habitable moons from contamination.

Ice Particles, Not Solid Sheets

Saturn's rings are composed of 99.9% pure water ice, from particles smaller than a grain of sand to chunks metres across. The dense main rings extend 80,000 km from Saturn's equator yet may be as thin as 10 metres. Their total mass is roughly two-thirds of Earth's Antarctic ice sheet. Galileo first saw them in 1610 but mistook them for companion bodies.