Like almost all of Saturn's moons, Enceladus keeps one face toward Saturn. (I just talked yesterday about the interesting exception.) That's for good reason - the closer you are to an object, the stronger the "slope" of its gravitational pull (and Enceladus orbits very close to Saturn: second closest world after Mimas). Because the planet's gravity ( Read more... )

Weird enough for you yet?

Hyperion is almost as big as Mimas - which has enough gravity to force itself into a sphere - yet is not remotely spherical - instead, it looks like this.


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Methone is a tiny, tiny little rock. It's only three miles long. Its orbit is between Mimas and Enceladus. Cassini found it about six years ago.

Why is Methone on this list? Simple. It's a freaking space pod left by aliens.


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The most common reaction I've heard when these two moons are explained to people (*) is "you have got to be shitting me ( Read more... )

I originally considered making a list of the top six moons of Saturn, not the top ten, because the ones up till now - as interesting as they (hopefully) have been, are just not in the same class as what's coming. Iapetus is, to me, where things really start getting good ( Read more... )

At this point, when I go over this list, I notice a couple themes about Saturn and her moons: they've taken a lot of major-impact damage, there are a bunch of complicated gravitational relationships, and there sure are a lot of little rocks around. Oh, right, and there are these dazzlingly bright rings, which none of the other gas giants have ( Read more... )

Third world out from the gas giant, Tethys is an ice ball, cratered but slightly smoothed from old ice melts. Like Mimas, it has an enormous crater - Odysseus - that, while it's more smoothed out and eroded than Herschel, is as big - proportionally - as Herschel is. Since Tethys is twice the size of Mimas, that makes Odysseus twice the size of ( Read more... )

Mimas is the innermost and smallest world of the Saturn system: about two hundred miles in diameter, it orbits just outside all the easily-visible rings.


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Until recently I wouldn't have put Rhea, or the similar moon Dione, into a top-ten list of Saturn's interesting moons. It's a moon. It has craters and mountains that make for a wispy appearance at a distance. It's otherwise pretty well-behaved and looks kind of generic as moons go. But the Cassini orbiter found out something weird about Rhea that ( Read more... )

I'm cheating here. These two aren't worlds, they're rocks. And there's two of them in this slot, but that's because it's the two of them working together that makes them interesting ( Read more... )