Not all those who wander are lost

 

  Not all those who wander are lost:

The sixth planet from the Sun, Saturn, displays its rings' subtle colors in this view captured from our Cassini spacecraft at a distance of 1.27 million miles (2.05 million km) from the center of the rings. Cassini launched in 1997 and arrived at Saturn in 2004, traveling 2.1 billion miles (3.4 billion km), and studied the gas giant and its moons until 2017, when it purposefully plunged into the planet's atmosphere, sending scientific data along the way.⁣

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While Saturn is not the only planet with rings, no other planet in our solar system has a ring system as complex and prominent as Saturn's. The gas giant's rings extend 175,000 miles (282,000 km) from the planet, made from mostly ice and rock particles that can range from dust-sized to as large as mountains. Research suggests that the rings (and some of Saturn's present-day moons) could have evolved from the debris of two icy moons that collided and shattered hundreds of millions of years ago.⁣

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Image description: Saturn's rings arc from bottom right to top right in small white-gray lines, some condensed, others distinguished. The rings emanate from the center-right of the image.⁣

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Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute⁣

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24 October  2023