Odd world: This stunning false-color view
of Saturn’s moon Hyperion reveals crisp details
across the strange, tumbling moon’s surface.
The view was obtained during Cassini’s very
notably reddish tint when viewed in natural
color. Cassini scientists think that Hyperion’s
unusual appearance can be attributed to
the fact that it has an unusually low density
for such a large object, giving it weak surface
gravity and high porosity. These characteristics help preserve the original shapes of
Hyperion’s craters by limiting the amount of
impact ejecta coating the moon’s surface.
Impactors tend to make craters by compressing the surface material, rather than blasting
it out. Further, Hyperion’s weak gravity, and
correspondingly low escape velocity, means
that what little ejecta is produced has a good
chance of escaping the moon altogether.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Epic Odysseus:
With an epic size, Odysseus Crater
stretches across a large northern
expanse on Saturn’s moon Tethys.
Odysseus Crater is 450 kilometers,
or 280 miles, across. The image was
taken in visible green light with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle
camera on Feb. 14, 2010. The view
was obtained at a distance of
approximately 178,000 kilometers
(111,000 miles) from Tethys. Image
scale is about 1 kilometer (about
3,485 feet) per pixel.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
34
34
www.RocketSTEM .org