That's smaller than the city of Boulder, Colorado. The tiny natural satellites are about 2 miles and 2.5 miles in diameter. They turned out to be the smallest bodies seen until then around the ringed planet. When the Cassini spacecraft from Earth arrived at Saturn in 2004, it promptly found two previously unseen moons. Triton, Nereid, Naiad, Thalassa, Despina, Galatea, Larissa, Proteus, plus others yet to receive names Titan, Rhea, Iapetus, Dione, Tethys, Enceladus, Mimas, Hyperion, Prometheus, Pandora, Phoebe, Janus, Epimetheus, Helene, Telesto, Calypso, Atlas, Pan, Ymir, Paaliaq, Siarnaq, Tarvos, Kiviuq, Ijiraq, Thrym, Skadi, Mundilfari, Erriapo, Albiorix, Suttung, plus others yet to receive namesĬordelia, Ophelia, Bianca, Cressida, Desdemona, Juliet, Portia, Rosalind, Belinda, Puck, Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, Oberon, Caliban, Sycorax, Prospero, Setebos, Stephano, Trinculo, plus others yet to receive names Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Amalthea, Himalia, Elara, Pasiphae, Sinope, Lysithea, Carme, Ananke, Leda, Metis, Adrastea, Thebe, Callirrhoe, Themisto, Kalyke, Iocaste, Erinome, Harpalyke, Isonoe, Praxidike, Megaclite, Taygete, Chaldene, Autonoe, Thyone, Hermippe, Eurydome, Sponde, Pasithee, Euanthe, Kale, Orthosie, Euporie, Aitne, plus others yet to receive names Saturn's moon Titan is the second largest in the Solar System with a diameter of 3,200 miles, half again as large as Earth's Moon. The largest moon is Ganymede with a diameter of 3,280 miles, even larger than either of the planets Mercury and Pluto. It is the only moon close enough to us that details of its surface can be seen through a telescope from Earth. The Moon is one of the larger natural satellites with a diameter of 2,160 miles. Pictures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope suggest there may be even more moons around those outer planets.Įarth's Moon. By comparison, Earth has one moon and Mars has two. Only Mercury and Venus do not have any moons. There also are many small moons that may be asteroids captured by their planets. Several moons are larger than the planet Pluto and two moons are larger than the planet Mercury. Almost 140 moons are known in the Solar System. While moons vary in size, each moon is much smaller than its planet. From Sydney, Australia, the planet appears due north at about midnight.A moon is a natural satellite rotating around a planet. The chart shows the view looking due south at 0100 BST on 16 August. This apparent “retrograde” motion began on 4 June and will last until 23 October. For a few months, instead of its usual eastward motion through the constellations, the planet moves westward. As Earth catches up and glides past Saturn, our perspective makes the distant planet appear to temporarily backtrack across the backdrop of stars. Seen from Earth, Saturn is centred in the opposite side of the sky to the sun, hence astronomers call this close pass “opposition”. Moving almost three times as quickly, Earth undertakes Saturn every 378 days, passing directly between it and the sun. Travelling at an average speed of 9.69km a second, Saturn takes roughly 29.5 years to complete a single orbit of the sun. Equal to roughly 150m km, that places Saturn 1.3bn km away currently. An astronomical unit is the radius of Earth’s orbit around the sun. On 14 August, Saturn is 8.86 astronomical units from Earth.
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