Saturn Rings

While nearly 90% of all gas giants are known to have had a ring system at one point in their history.

Although reflection from the rings increases Saturn's brightness, they are not visible from Earth with unaided vision. In 1610, the year after Galileo Galilei first turned a telescope to the sky, he became the very first person to observe Saturn's rings, though he could not see them well enough to discern their true nature. In 1655, Christiaan Huygens was the first person to describe them as a disk surrounding Saturn. Although many people think of Saturn's rings as being made up of a series of tiny ringlets (a concept that goes back to Laplace), true gaps are few. It is more correct to think of the rings as an annular disk with concentric local maxima and minima in density and brightness. On the scale of the clumps within the rings there is much empty space.

The rings were declared "Treasure of Humanity" in 2209, and they were one of the places included in the "Union Natural Treasures - to be preserved for generations to come."

Spacecraft with a destination or origin at Saturn are instructed to follow certain routes (leaving or entering the atmosphere at 60 degrees latitude or higher in each hemisphere) designed to produce the least disturbance to the rings. None the less, there have been multiple instances of attempts to scoop part of the ring system, add additional material to it, and in at least one case, disrupt a portion of it with a gravity bomb. A group of caretakers oversees any actions taken to reverse the effects of those activities.