Saturn Educational Astronomy Posters, Art Prints, and Charts

Facts about Saturn
• Distance from the sun: 1.8 billion miles
• Diameter: 75,000 miles (equatorial)
• Length of year: .5
• Rotation period/length of “day”: approximately 10-11 hours
• Temperature: Minus 270º F. or -168º C.
• Atmosphere: Hydrogen, helium
• Number of moons: observed 200

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Saturn is named after the Roman god of agriculture Saturnus, (the Greek Kronos, father of Zeus) sharing the same root word with Saturday.

The name Saturn was given to a family of American rocket boosters that were adopted as the launch vehicles for the Apollo moon program.

They were first developed by a team of mostly German rocket scientists led by Wernher von Braun to launch heavy payloads to Earth orbit and beyond.

FYI - Apollo 11 was the spaceflight which landed the first humans, Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, Jr, on Earth's Moon on July 20, 1969.

In Roman mythology the god Saturnus presiding over agriculture and harvest time and was associated with wealth.

The Greek equivalent to Saturn was the god Cronos who ruled the outermost realms. Since the planet was the furtherest observable in ancient history, the body became associated with the god Saturnus.

The temple to Saturnus stood at the foot of Rome's Capitoline Hill in the western end of the Forum, housing the treasury where reserves of gold and silver were stored. The ruins of the pediment and eight surviving columns represent an iconic images of Rome's ancient architectural heritage.