Starship Asterisk*

Nine Earths side by side would almost span Saturn’s diameter. That doesn’t include Saturn’s rings.

Saturn is the sixth planet from our Sun (a star) and orbits at a distance of about 886 million miles (1.4 billion kilometers) from the Sun.

Saturn takes about 10.7 hours (no one knows precisely) to rotate on its axis once—a Saturn “day”—and 29 Earth years to orbit the sun.

Saturn is a gas-giant planet and therefore does not have a solid surface like Earth’s. But it might have a solid core somewhere in there.

Saturn's atmosphere is made up mostly of hydrogen (H2) and helium (He).

Saturn has 53 known moons with an additional 29 moons awaiting confirmation of their discovery—that is a total of 82 moons.

Saturn has the most spectacular ring system, with seven rings and several gaps and divisions between them.

Few missions have visited Saturn: Pioneer 11 and Voyagers 1 and 2 flew by; But Cassini orbited Saturn 294 times from 2004 to 2017.

Saturn cannot support life as we know it, but some of Saturn's moons have conditions that might support life.

About two tons of Saturn’s mass came from Earth—the Cassini spacecraft was intentionally vaporized in Saturn’s atmosphere in 2017.

Charlotte Bridgestone wrote: ↑Thu Jun 03, 2021 9:52 am
What about Saturn's rings, their nature? There are few theories about it but I prefer the latest one which appeared after Cassini approached the giant. According to the new model, that happened due to several successive absorptions by Saturn of its satellites, billions of years ago, orbiting the young gas giant. Gradually, due to the gravitational effect, these satellites, one after another, "dumped" into the bowels of Saturn.

• "Dumped" into the bowels of Saturn
  
  More of a "Bum's Roche" than a "Bowel Movement."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roche_limit wrote:
<<In celestial mechanics, the Roche limit, also called Roche radius, is the distance from a celestial body within which a second celestial body, held together only by its own force of gravity, will disintegrate because the first body's tidal forces exceed the second body's gravitational self-attraction. Inside the Roche limit, orbiting material disperses and forms rings, whereas outside the limit material tends to coalesce. The Roche radius depends on the radius of the first body and on the ratio of the bodies' densities. The term is named after Édouard Roche (English: /rɒʃ/ ROSH), who was the French astronomer who first calculated this theoretical limit in 1848.>>

https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=bowel wrote:
<<bowel (n.) c. 1300, usually plural, bowels, "human organs of the abdominal cavity," from late 14c. specifically as "human intestines," from Old French boele "intestines, bowels, innards" (12c., Modern French boyau), from Medieval Latin botellus "small intestine," originally "sausage," diminutive of botulus "sausage," a word borrowed from Oscan-Umbrian.

Transferred sense of "the viscera as the seat of emotions" is from late 14c.; especially "inner parts as the seat of pity or kindness," hence "tenderness, compassion." Greek splankhnon (from the same PIE root as spleen) was a word for the principal internal organs, which also were felt in ancient times to be the seat of various emotions. Greek poets, from Aeschylus down, regarded the bowels as the seat of the more violent passions such as anger and love, but by the Hebrews they were seen as the seat of tender affections, especially kindness, benevolence, and compassion. Splankhnon was used in Septuagint to translate a Hebrew word, and from thence early Bibles in English rendered it in its literal sense as bowels, which thus acquired in English a secondary meaning of "pity, compassion" (late 14c.). But in later editions the word often was translated as heart. Bowel movement is attested by 1874.>>