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shelly w

whats you favorite planet besides earth, and if you could live there would you?

Dear Shelly,

My favorite planet is Saturn because it is so beautiful...and I worked on NASA's Cassini mission to Saturn for several years...

But I definitely wouldn't want to live there....and life can't exist there anyway--it is a big ball of gas with maybe a small solid core.  I'd like to visit Saturn's moon Titan which at least has a surface and weather...but even there I would need a spacesuit at least! It is very, very cold way out there...10 times farther from the Sun than Earth.

 Paulett

 Hi Shelly,

 I think the planet Saturn is a really interesting place and NASA/ESA missions have taken some really beautiful photos of it.  Most photos of Saturn show it as a sort of golden color, but some recent photos from the Cassini mission show that close to the planet, the skies in Saturn's northern hemisphere sometimes appear to be blue just like the sky on Earth.  You can see some of these photos here:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/whycassini/17feb_bluesaturn.html

 While I think that Saturn might be a nice place to visit, I don't think I would want to live there!  Saturn is a gas giant type planet, so it doesn't have a solid surface where humans could live.   It might be possible someday to establish some kind of colony on the solid surface of one of Saturn's larger moons, like Titan.  However, Titan is very cold and inhospitable to humans.  We can't breathe the atmosphere on Titan and it is so far away that it takes a long time to get there from Earth.  I'm not sure I'd want to live on Titan, either!  You can read more about Titan here:

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/science/index.cfm?SciencePageID=73

Kris