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Saturn has a ring that is 6 million miles wide.

"Curiosity, you are such an amazing space mission that we will sacrifice a thousand blog posts, a million gallons of newsprint even, in your honor. But can you do this? NASA's Cassini probe, not content to be forgotten in its faraway orbit around Saturn and its moons, has beamed back new natural-color images of the ringed planet that are absolutely breathtaking. Released yesterday, they show a very different planet than the one Cassini arrived at eight years ago."

"tarting 35 years ago, our view of the solar system was forever changed. The launch of the Voyager 1 probe on Sept. 5, 1977 ushered in a golden era of planetary exploration. Along with its sister probe, Voyager 2, the spacecraft took the first detailed images of planets in the outer solar system, discovering magnificent rings, churning atmospheric processes, and volcanic activity on tiny moons. Voyager 2 actually launched on Aug. 20, slightly earlier than its counterpart, but took a longer route to reach Jupiter and Saturn after Voyager 1. The Voyager probes were a scaled-back version of a proposed "Grand Planetary Tour" mission, which would have used a rare alignment in the outer solar system to swing from planet to planet with minimal fuel. In the original plan, four spacecraft would have visited all the gas giants and even tiny Pluto (then still a planet). But without budgetary support from President Nixon and Congress, the ambitious mission was canceled. Since the 1977 planetary configuration occurred only once every 177 years, NASA engineers decided to go forward with a new plan - the Voyager probes, two identical robots that would travel to Jupiter and Saturn and, if successful, on to Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 1 ultimately performed a closer encounter with Saturn's moon Titan that flung it out of the solar system, and only Voyager 2 made it to the latter planets."