Cassini: Mission to Saturn special report. Catch the latest astounding discoveries in Cassini's $3 billion, 4-year tour of the Ringed Planet, plus our Expert Guide including a new Instant Expert, FAQ and more…
COMPARED with the appropriately named Titan (see "Touchdown on Titan"), Saturn's other moons are small fry. Roll them all together and you would get a sphere only around 2000 kilometres across, much smaller than our moon. And yet these little moons are not just boring lumps of ice and rock. Each is a miniature world, with its own character and its own story to tell.
Iapetus's appearance has puzzled astronomers for decades. One of its faces is black, the other white. The mystery deepened in 1981 when the Voyager 2 spacecraft flew past at a distance of 900,000 kilometres and found that the moon is oddly squashed. To cap it all, ...
18:00 23 July 2008
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