Journey to Saturn: A Cosmic Adventure

In 2017, NASA’s Cassini probe sent us our closest view of Saturn as it dove into the planet’s stormy atmosphere. And the results were stunning. But what would it be like if humans made the journey in person? At its closest, Saturn is 1.2 billion kilometers away from Earth. So with today’s spacecraft technology, you’ll need about eight years to make the trip. Finally, you arrive and get your first glimpse of Saturn with your own eyes. It’s an enormous planet, the second largest in the solar system. In fact, over 760 planet Earths can fit inside. That’s a lot of room for activities!

But hold up. We can’t visit Saturn and skip over the best part, its iconic rings. Saturn’s rings are almost as wide as the distance between the Earth and the moon, so at first glance, they seem like an easy place to land and explore on foot. Except there’s one problem. While they look like giant discs, they’re not a solid track at all. Instead, they’re made of millions of chunks of ice, some as tiny as dust particles, others as large as buses. But if you could hike on one of Saturn’s outermost rings, you’ll walk about 12 million kilometers to make it around the longest one. That’s about 15 round trips from the Earth to the moon. Along the way, you’ll come across tiny moons and spokes of dust levitating above the surface.

Now, you might notice that streams of tiny ice particles are also flying off the rings, heading toward Saturn. That’s ring rain. It turns out, Saturn’s magnetic fields are slowly but surely draining away the rings, so we’re lucky to visit the rings now because every 30 minutes they lose enough water to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool, and if we arrived 300 million years in the future we’d miss them entirely.

Now let’s climb back aboard and visit the planet, 282000 kilometers away. As we reach the north pole we’ll notice a slight problem with our plan to land on the surface below. There is no surface below! Saturn is made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium gas which is why it’s called a gas giant.

4000 kilometers above the surface we hit Saturn’s upper atmosphere. As we plummet through the north pole we’ll be treated to the sight of a magnificent aurora like the ones we see in Alaska. It turns out Saturn’s magnetic field generates huge electrical currents which heat up the atmosphere at the poles.

Unfortunately, the electrical activity within this aurora can disrupt our ship’s electronics and navigation system so best marvel at a distance.

Next, we’ll hit the troposphere - where the weather happens! So watch out powerful winds may slam into us at nearly 400 meters per second! That’s over three times faster than the strongest hurricanes on Earth! All around us thick yellow clouds give the planet its color - these are filled with ammonia crystals.

If you take a sniff you might be able to smell that distinctive scent but you should probably keep the window closed - ammonia is very irritating and could wreak havoc on your respiratory system! Plus it’s freezing out here reaching as low as minus 250 degrees Celsius much colder than East Antarctic Plateau -the coldest place on Earth!

So let’s head down where it’s a bit warmer - down here at a depth of 300 kilometers we reach a layer of water which is a balmy 0 degrees Celsius! Now -the deeper we plunge- the higher pressure is around us -and in this next layer- the pressure is so high it forces those liquid water molecules together creating solid ice!

That ice mixes in with surrounding gasses so get ready to fight through a flurry of hail! Hopefully- ice won’t shred our ship to pieces but if we make it through get ready to go for a swim because 1000 kilometers into internal pressure is so high it forces hydrogen molecules together into a liquid which doesn’t bode well for us since even sturdiest submarine would be crushed in these conditions!

And if we somehow survive to reach the next layer we’ll hit yet another obstacle -a layer of liquid metallic hydrogen- problem here is that this metal can conduct electricity so even if our navigation equipment and electronics escape aurora upstairs it’s probably down for count now!

But if we could survive here our final stop might uncover the mystery in the deepest depths of Saturn! You see scientists suspect Saturn has a core made of iron and nickel but they’re not sure if it’s liquid like the previous layer or solid like Earth's core! So maybe we’ll be lucky ones to find out once and for all though it’s over 83000 degrees Celsius in here hotter than the surface of the sun and hot enough to dissolve our spacecraft with us inside! Hm. Maybe we should leave the Saturn exploration to unmanned probes after all. After all, we wouldn’t want to end up as a melted puddle of goo on the surface of a gas giant. That would be one heck of a way to go!