Saturn Is the Real Lord of the Rings

Hand-Picked Images from Our Solar System’s (Arguably) Most Photogenic Planet

by Linda Spilker

Neither you nor I could survive at Saturn. It’s cold and so far away (900 million miles) that the sun looks like a bright dot. There’s none of the kind of air we can breathe on Saturn—or even a solid surface. But we don’t physically have to be at the Ringed Planet to know what it’s like. We have a robot exploring Saturn and its moons for us: NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.

Cassini has been exploring the Saturn system for nearly a decade—engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in …