Top UNIVERSE Facts:On the Raw of SATURN

Did you know that the Cassini-Huygens Mission is an international collaboration between three space agencies and 17 nations contributed to building the spacecraft? More than 250 scientists worldwide will study the data collected. Saturn's beautiful rings are not solid. They are made up of particles of ice, dust and rock -- some as tiny as grains of sand, some much larger than skyscrapers. The Compton Gamma Ray Observatory was safely de-orbited and re-entered the Earth's atmosphere on June 4, 2000. Any pieces that survived landed in a remote area of the Pacific Ocean. It's pretty windy on Saturn. Winds around the planet's equator can reach 1,800 kilometers (1,118 miles) per hour. In comparison, the fastest winds on Earth reach only about 400 kilometers (about 250 miles) per hour. Four days after it was launched, the Deep Space 1 spacecraft was about 1,000,000 kilometers (about 600,000 miles) from Earth. To fly that far in a jet, you would have to fly for 6 weeks without stopping! Although other planets have rings too, Saturn's rings are the only ones that are visible from Earth even with a small telescope. To communicate with distant spacecraft, NASA's Deep Space Network uses antenna with a diameter of up to 70 meters (230 feet). That is almost as big as a football field. Saturn, the "Ringed Planet," is so far away from the Sun that it receives only about 1/80th the amount of sunlight that we receive here on Earth. Yes, the Sun appears much smaller from there. It's a small world. More than 1,000 Earths would fit into Jupiter's vast sphere. Scientists are particularly interested in Saturn's moon Titan because it's one of the few known moons with its own dense atmosphere. Titan's atmosphere is also thought to be very similar to what Earth's atmosphere was a long time ago. By learning about Titan, we'll learn about our own planet. A penumbral eclipse is the outer shadow in a zone where the Earth blocks part, but not all, of the Sun's rays from reaching the Moon. In contrast, the inner or umbral shadow is a region where the Earth blocks all direct sunlight from reaching the Moon. When the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft arrives at Saturn, it will be traveling so fast that engineers will need to burn the spacecraft's engines for 97 minutes just to slow it down. If mission engineers don't do this, the spacecraft would keep on going, instead of entering the orbit around Saturn. Titan is the largest of Saturn's moons. It is the second largest moon in the solar system. In fact, it is larger than both Mercury and Pluto.