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Mission to Saturn: Sizing Up Moons, Rings and Sunlight

Grade 8 solar system scale practice: use mission data on Saturn's moons, rings and sunlight to compare sizes, masses, widths and distances.

Grade 8ScienceInteractive · Printable

Aligned toMS-ESS1-3

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What’s included

Single worksheet
Auto-graded online
1 NGSS standard
Printable answer key
12 questions
Classroom-ready

Details

Format: Interactive · Printable
Grade: Grade 8
Subject: Science
Question types: Fill in the blank, Multiple choice, Short answer

About this worksheet

What students practice

Students analyze diameter, mass and distance data to compare the scale of Saturn's moons.
Students use ring measurements to describe the width and thickness of Saturn's rings with ratios.
Students use distance from the Sun to judge how much sunlight a spacecraft at Saturn would get.

How to use

Use after students know what diameter, mass and AU mean. Calculators help in Parts 2 and 3; ask students to say each ratio in words before they choose an answer.

Curriculum

NGSS standard covered

MS-ESS1-3

Analyze data to find the scale properties of objects in the solar system.

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Mission to Saturn: Sizing Up Moons, Rings and Sunlight

Analyze moon, ring and distance data from a mission briefing to compare the scale of objects in Saturn's system.

Part 1: Saturn's moons

Read the briefing and Table 1, then answer questions 1–5.

The Saturn Briefing

1Each summer, a space agency invites a group of teens to sit in on mission planning. This year eighth grader Nadia Esterhuizen joined a briefing for a future probe to Saturn. The probe would orbit the planet for several years, fly past many of its moons and later send a small lander to one of them. Mission engineer Dr. Oskar Ferreira-Bloom started with data that earlier spacecraft and telescopes had gathered. Each moon's diameter was measured from close-up photos, and its mass was worked out from how strongly its gravity tugged on passing spacecraft and on nearby moons. Table 1 lists Saturn's seven largest moons. Saturn has many more moons, but the others are much smaller.

2Next he showed the rings. Saturn is about 120,500 km wide at its equator, so its cloud tops are about 60,300 km from its center. The bright main rings start about 74,000 km from Saturn's center and end about 137,000 km from its center. They are made mostly of countless pieces of ice, from specks of dust to chunks as big as a house. In most places the main rings are only about 10 m thick. To steer clear of the rings, the probe will cross the ring plane outside the main rings, except near the end of the mission, when it will dive through the gap between the cloud tops and the inner edge of the rings.

3Last came power. Saturn is about 9.5 AU from the Sun, where 1 AU is Earth's distance from the Sun. Sunlight spreads out as it travels, so the sunlight reaching each square meter at a distance of d AU is 1 ÷ (d × d) of the sunlight at Earth. The probe's instruments and radio need about 400 W of electric power.

4Before the briefing ended, Dr. Ferreira-Bloom asked the group to think about the lander. Some engineers want to send it to Titan. Others point out that Saturn has several other large moons that are closer to the planet and easier to reach. Nadia noticed that the moons in Table 1 have very different sizes, and she decided to compare them with numbers before giving her opinion at the next meeting.

Table 1: Saturn's Seven Largest Moons (rounded)
Moon	Diameter (km)	Distance to Saturn (km)	Mass (Enceladus = 1)
Mimas	396	186,000	0.35
Enceladus	504	238,000	1
Tethys	1,062	295,000	5.7
Dione	1,123	377,000	10.1
Rhea	1,527	527,000	21.4
Titan	5,150	1,222,000	1,245
Iapetus	1,469	3,561,000	16.7