How does Saturn compare to Earth?
Saturn is very different from earth. You couldn’t stand on the surface of Saturn as it’s surface is Hydrogen gas. Saturn’s day of 10.7 hours is much shorter than Earth’s while Saturn’s year is over 29 Earth years. Saturn is also much, much bigger than Earth and Saturn has 60 moons vs. Earth’s 1 moon. In addition, Saturn is unique from all the planets in the Solar system with its highly visible and gigantic rings. How do we know about Saturn? Since Saturn can be seen with the naked eye, we have known of the existence of Saturn since ancient times. Galileo was the first to notice that there was something around Saturn, but didn’t recognize this as rings. Christian Huygens first noted that Saturn had rings. The first space probe to visit Saturn and bring us close up pictures was Pioneer 11 in 1979. A few years later, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 would bring us much better pictures and more information on the rings of Saturn. The first to orbit Saturn was the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft in 2004.
