March 12, 2023
On the day you were born, the universe did what it has always done best: transformed chaos into beauty.
Saturn's Hyperion: A Moon with Odd Craters
Birthday · March 12, 2023
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APOD published March 12, 2023. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
What lies at the bottom of Hyperion's strange craters? To help find out, the robot Cassini spacecraft that once orbited Saturn swooped past the sponge-textured moon and took images of unprecedented detail. A six-image mosaic from the 2005 pass, featured here in scientifically assigned colors, shows a remarkable world strewn with strange craters and an odd, sponge-like surface. At the bottom of most craters lies some type of unknown dark reddish material. This material appears similar to that covering part of another of Saturn's moons, Iapetus, and might sink into the ice moon as it better absorbs warming sunlight. Hyperion is about 250 kilometers across, rotates chaotically, and has a density so low that it likely houses a vast system of caverns inside.