Ken Owens, age 12, of Tulsa, Okla., for his question:

WHAT ARE THE RINGS OF SATURN?

Second-largest of all the planets is Saturn. It

is the sixth planet away from the sun while the earth is third. Compared to the earth, Saturn is 10 times larger--about 75,000 miles in diameter at the equator while the earth is about 7,800 miles. Saturn travels in an oval-shaped or elliptical orbit around the sun. A total of 10,759 earth-days are required for

Saturn to go completely around the sun, while the earth only takes 365 days. That means a year on Saturn takes about 29 and a half earth-years.

But Saturn has something that earth lacks. In fact it has a unique feature among the planets: three gleaming rings that are considered to be among the most beautiful objects in our entire solar system.

Saturn's rings are probably made of swarms of tiny particles that travel around the planet at its equator. As the planet makes its orbit around the sun, the rings always tilt at the same angle as the equator and because of this, the rings can be seen at various angles when viewed from earth through a telescope.

The particles that make up the rings of Saturn are probably ice crystals or tiny objects covered with ice. Each particle, astronomers estimate, is about one-tenth of an inch in diameter.

The outer ring is about 10,000 miles wide with a total diameter of 170,000 miles--about twice the diameter of the planet itself. A 3,000-mile empty space is located between the outer ring and the center one. The second ring is the brightest of the three and is about 16,000 miles wide. Smallest and most difficult to see is the ring closest to Saturn. It is 7,000 miles away from the center ring and is rather small and almost transparent.

Saturn's rings appear to be less than 10 miles thick. The rings are so thin, as a matter of fact, that they are invisible to astronomers on earth when they are in direct line with the earth.

Galileo, the famous Italian astronomer of early days, is given credit for having discovered the rings of Saturn early in the 1600s.

Christian Huygens, the Dutch astronomer who had a more powerful telescope, called the rings of Saturn flat and thin when he studied them in 1655. He thought they were a solid sheet of some material.

In 1675 A French astronomer named Jean Boneniquke Cassini was the first to announce to the world that there were separate rings made up of small satellites.

For latest information on Saturn Rings go to Science News in YouAskAndy main menu and click on NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory