Abstract. The three rings A, Band C of Saturn and the two gaps French and Cassini divisions in between them have been subjected to a study of deterministic chaos and we have shown the existence of spatially distributed strange at tractors, implying thereby that the system is open, dissipative, nonequilibrium and non-Markovian in character.Matter ring formation in the solar system in general (such as Asteroidal Belt) and in planetary environment (Galilian planets) in particular has still evaded adequate explanation. Various theories have been put forward based on Newtonian mechanics of three-body dynamics to explain the formation of gaps by gravitational collisional self focussing (Trulson, 1971), scavenging of matter by satellites involving resonance theory (Berry, 1978) with limited success. However, there seem to be only few attempts to analyse the data obtained by the various missions towards an understanding of the dynamics of these systems. In this paper, we propose to apply the recently developed theory of deterministic chaos (Schuster 1984) to the data acquired by the Voyager missions (photopolarimeter recordings; Esposito et al., 1983). It may be mentio.ned that a study in the framework of deterministic chaos is relevent in the case of Saturn rings, in view of the results of Wisdom (1983) wherein he has shown that in asteroidal belt, 3: 1 Kirkwood gap coincides with the outer boundary of a chaotic zone. The significance of 3: 1 resonance out of all resonances was pointed out for the first time by Pratap (1977).Our analysis in the present paper is not dependent on any particular Hamiltonian; and, hence, the dynamics that is imbedded in the actual data which become explicit here would enable one to frame a more realistic theory. The main results in this paper are that the system is in nonequilibrium state and is nonlinear and dissipative, and has only little information capacity as revealed by the low Kolmogorov entropy. Mathematical AnalysisThe data set consists of the extinction data as recorded by the photo polarimeter in the Voyager mission from which the density distribution as a function of distance is obtained as given in Figure 1. This is recorded at an interval of 65 km (O.OO2Rs) for a distance ranging from the inner edge of the innermost ring (C Ring) to the outer edge of A ring. The F ring and the gap between A and Fare EaT/h, Moon, and Planets 44: 105-119, 1989.