While cruising around Saturn in early October 2004, Cassini captured a series of images that have been composed into a large global natural color view of Saturn and its rings.

Saturn was the most distant of the five planets known to the ancients. Like Jupiter, Saturn is made mostly of hydrogen and helium. Its volume is 755 times greater than that of Earth. Winds in the upper atmosphere reach 500 meters (1,600 feet) per second in the equatorial region. These super-fast winds, combined with heat rising from within the planet's interior, cause the yellow and gold bands visible in the atmosphere.

Saturn's spectacular and complex rings are made mostly of water ice. Spacecraft images reveal braided rings, ringlets and spokes - dark features in the rings that circle the planet at different rates from that of the surrounding ring material. Saturn's ring system extends hundreds of thousands of kilometers from the planet, yet the vertical depth is typically about 10 meters (30 feet) in the main rings, although when viewed edge-on there are vertical formations in some rings that seem to pile up in bumps or ridges more than 3 kilometers (2 miles) tall.

The next chapter in our knowledge of Saturn is being written right now by the Cassini mission, which has been studying the ringed gas giant from orbit since 2004.

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