400 Years ago Galileo became the first person to look at "Saturn" through a telescope. Scientists have been studying the planet and specially the many rings that surround Saturn ever since in hopes of learning more. It's not the only planet with rings, Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus all have rings. Saturn's rings are the biggest and  brightest.

     These rings are different in size some are as small as a grain of sand and some as big as a house. The rings are made up of ice and rocks, they travel around Saturn at very high speeds. Although, scientist aren't sure when or how these rings were formed. But one theory presented for the rings points to the 60 plus moons (that we know of!) orbiting Saturn. Some times asteroids and meteoroids crash into the many moons of Saturn causing them to breakaway and fall into Saturn's gravitational pull. The rings might also me made up of material from when Saturn was first formed.

From far away, Saturn looks like it has 7 large rings. Each large ring is named for a letter of the alphabet, a closer look reveals each large rings is made up of several small rings called ringlets. Saturn is so large that 700 Earths could fit inside it, and these rings are thousands of miles wide! If you were to drive a car it would take more than a week to drive across some of Saturn's rings.

In 1997 NASA launched Cassini, a spacecraft to explore Saturn. Cassini arrived at Saturn 7 years later in 2004 and it has been pretty active, sending back information and some amazing pictures all the time.