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Jun 30, 2013
Saturn's Hyperion: A Moon with Odd Craters
Image Credit & Copyright: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA
Courtesy of http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Saturn's Hyperion: A Moon with Odd Craters
Image Credit & Copyright: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA
Courtesy of http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
What lies at the bottom of
Hyperion's strange craters?
Nobody's sure.
To help find out, the
robot Cassini spacecraft now orbiting
Saturn
swooped past the
sponge-textured moon in 2005 and
2010 and took images of unprecedented detail.
An image from the 2005 pass,
shown above in false color, shows a remarkable world strewn with
strange craters and a
generally odd surface.
The slight differences in color likely show differences in surface composition.
At the bottom of most craters lies some type of
unknown dark material.
Inspection of the image shows bright features indicating that the dark material might be only tens of meters thick in some places.
Hyperion
is about 250 kilometers across,
rotates chaotically,
and has a density so low that it
might house a vast system of
caverns inside.
