Ringed gas giant
A world of hydrogen and helium, with no solid surface to stand on.
Its north pole holds a six-sided jet stream wider than Earth.
Named for the Roman god of agriculture.
Countless worlds of ice
Billions of separate pieces orbit together: mostly ice, with rock and dust.
Some grains are dust-sized. Other pieces are as large as mountains.
The dark Cassini Division separates the broad A and B rings.
Saturn I · Icy moon
Herschel crater spans roughly a third of this small moon’s diameter.
The impact left scars on the opposite side and may have nearly broken Mimas apart.
Named after a Giant from Greek myth.
An ocean beneath ice
A global ocean hides beneath its bright, frozen shell.
South-polar jets throw water and ice into space, feeding Saturn’s faint E ring.
Named after a Giant from Greek myth.
Enceladus · South-polar jets
Water vapor and icy grains escape through warm fractures called tiger stripes.
Cassini flew through the spray, sampling material from the ocean below.
The jets carry clues to chemistry and possible hydrothermal activity deep inside.
An almost entirely icy world
Water ice makes up most of this pale moon.
Ithaca Chasma cuts a vast valley about 2,000 kilometers across its surface.
The valley may record the expansion of water freezing inside the moon.
Bright cliffs on dark plains
Its pale wisps are networks of ice cliffs, not deposits of frost.
Canyon walls rise hundreds of meters. Falling dark material exposes bright ice beneath.
These fractures preserve signs of an active tectonic past.
Saturn’s second-largest moon
Cold ice preserves a heavily cratered landscape.
Cassini detected an extremely thin veil of oxygen and carbon dioxide.
The oxygen forms as energetic particles strike the icy surface.
A world behind orange haze
A thick nitrogen atmosphere hides the surface.
Methane rain feeds rivers, lakes and seas in a cycle strangely like Earth’s.
Sunlight drives chemistry in the atmosphere, making the haze and material for dark dunes.
A tumbling, porous moon
Deep craters give this irregular moon its sponge-like face.
Its low density suggests a great deal of empty space inside.
It tumbles chaotically, with Titan’s gravity helping to disturb its rotation.
A moon of two faces
One hemisphere is very dark; the other is bright with ice.
An enormous ridge follows much of its equator, rising about 10 kilometers above the plains.
How that ridge formed remains unresolved.
A likely captured wanderer
Phoebe travels around Saturn in the opposite direction to most of its moons.
Its dark surface reflects only about six percent of incoming sunlight.
Its unusual orbit and composition suggest an origin farther out in the solar system.