[Cassini] Hyperion: What the heck?!

[Malenfant]

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/i ... geID=50170



It's either a huge lump of pumice or a giant space wasp nest . I don't think we've seen anything like this anywhere in the solar system, it's totally unlike any other asteroidal bodies.

[Spaceman Spiff]

Of course, the dark blotches are not holes, but dark dust gathered at the bottom of craters. The dust might have settled evenly at first (from Iapetus?) and then been shaken to the bottom after more shaking from further craters and impacts. There's also the streaks down the sides of craters and escarpments too. There's more evidence that dust gets shaken down on small bodies by impacts shaking the body: Eros, Phobos, Phoebe, Tempel 1, etc.

Compare to Don's moon Cima in his newly released Add On. In that, Don said the craters released a dark carbon-like substance from underneath the surface to create the dark spots, but here but here the craters have gathered dust into their pits from their sides.

You can also see that the face is mostly taken by a large, eroded impact crater. Most of the sides have collapsed into the pit, and forms a hump in the middle (the material tries to fit the local 'horizontal' which is not flat). It's since been pummelled by more craters. I think there's an even larger crater with a vague central peak on the other side.

Spiff.

[Dollan]

Isn't Hyperion the moon with the chaotic rotation? That very large impact crater could be the cause of that rotation. Or, it could be a relic impact crater from a time when Hyperion was a part of a much alrger body. So many moons of Saturn seem to have large diameter impact craters, I don't think it's a surprise that we could find circumstantial evidence of at least one that was broken apart.

...John...

[hank]

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/raw/raw-images-details.cfm?feiImageID=50170

Compare this view from Celestia.

- Hank

[WildMoon]

At first I too thought it looked like pumice.

[lostfisherman]

This shows the localised dark spot stuff a little more clearly; it's a bit like a bump map in places.

http://saturn1.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/ ... geID=50175

At the bottom of the above image there are some strange elongated shapes likely the result of collapse, shown a bit better below

http://saturn1.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/ ... geID=50255

Wonderful pictures

[lostfisherman]

You all should have seen this, but wow...

http://saturn1.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/ ... ageID=1762

It' a false colour view showing composition, they apparently had to tone down the redness.

[Spaceman Spiff]

I have this suspicion: Titan is actually formed of several smaller moons of Saturn. These former moons of 2,000km to 3,000km diameter probably continued the trend of increasing size and orbit that can be seen from Mimas out to Rhea, each being larger than and having an orbit slightly more distant from the the next inner moon. I suspect Saturn's satellite system started out more like Uranus'. In time these larger moons started to wander (maybe perturbing each other by being too massive and too many for the closely spaced orbits they were in) until one by one they collided and finally gathered into Titan.

If you compare Saturn's satellite system to Jupiter's and Uranus' in a logarithmic fashion (both by mass and orbit) you can see that Titan is odd in the scheme of Saturn's moons: it is much larger than the others, and it occupies a gap between Rhea and Iapetus, except for Hyperion, which is in an eccentric orbit close to Titan's, and is probably a left over piece of the whole Titan forming process.



Spiff.