 Cassini radar view of Guabonito | |
| Feature type | Ring feature |
|---|---|
| Eponym | Guabonito |
Guabonito is a ring of bright features on Saturn's moon Titan. Currently, the feature is thought to be a partially buried impact crater, with the bright features representing the crater's rim. [1]
Guabonito was first seen in Cassini images taken in October 2004 and has been observed several times since.
Guabonito was observed by the Cassini radar instrument's synthetic aperture radar imaging mode on April 30, 2006. [2]
This ringed features, 90 kilometers across, is located in Titan's Shangri-La dark region, near the boundary with Xanadu, and is centered at 10°54′S150°48′W / 10.9°S 150.8°W . [3]
This feature is named after Guabonito, the Taíno Indian sea goddess who taught the use of amulets.
Callisto, or Jupiter IV, is the second-largest moon of Jupiter, after Ganymede. It is the third-largest moon in the Solar System after Ganymede and Saturn's largest moon Titan, and the largest object in the Solar System that may not be properly differentiated. Callisto was discovered in 1610 by Galileo Galilei. With a diameter of 4821 km, Callisto is about 99% the diameter of the planet Mercury, but only about a third of its mass. It is the fourth Galilean moon of Jupiter by distance, with an orbital radius of about 1883000 km. It is not in an orbital resonance like the three other Galilean satellites—Io, Europa, and Ganymede—and is thus not appreciably tidally heated. Callisto's rotation is tidally locked to its orbit around Jupiter, so that the same hemisphere always faces inward. Because of this, there is a sub-Jovian point on Callisto's surface, from which Jupiter would appear to hang directly overhead. It is less affected by Jupiter's magnetosphere than the other inner satellites because of its more remote orbit, located just outside Jupiter's main radiation belt.
Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second-largest in the Solar System, after Jupiter. It is a gas giant with an average radius of about nine and a half times that of Earth. It has only one-eighth the average density of Earth, but is over 95 times more massive.
Titan is the largest moon of Saturn and the second-largest natural satellite in the Solar System. It is the only moon known to have a dense atmosphere, and is the only known object in space other than Earth on which clear evidence of stable bodies of surface liquid has been found.
Rhea is the second-largest moon of Saturn and the ninth-largest moon in the Solar System. It is the smallest body in the Solar System for which precise measurements have confirmed a shape consistent with hydrostatic equilibrium. It was discovered in 1672 by Giovanni Domenico Cassini.
Cassini–Huygens, commonly called Cassini, was a space-research mission by NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Italian Space Agency (ASI) to send a space probe to study the planet Saturn and its system, including its rings and natural satellites. The Flagship-class robotic spacecraft comprised both NASA's Cassini space probe and ESA's Huygens lander, which landed on Saturn's largest moon, Titan. Cassini was the fourth space probe to visit Saturn and the first to enter its orbit, where it stayed from 2004 to 2017. The two craft took their names from the astronomers Giovanni Cassini and Christiaan Huygens.
Tethys, or Saturn III, is a mid-sized moon of Saturn about 1,060 km (660 mi) across. It was discovered by G. D. Cassini in 1684 and is named after the titan Tethys of Greek mythology.
Iapetus is a moon of Saturn. It is the 24th of Saturn’s 83 known moons. With an estimated diameter of 1,469 km, it is the third-largest moon of Saturn and the eleventh-largest in the Solar System. Named after the Titan Iapetus, the moon was discovered in 1671 by Giovanni Domenico Cassini.
Dione is a moon of Saturn. It was discovered by Italian astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini in 1684. It is named after the Titaness Dione of Greek mythology. It is also designated Saturn IV.
Enceladus is the sixth-largest moon of Saturn. It is about 500 kilometers in diameter, about a tenth of that of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. Enceladus is mostly covered by fresh, clean ice, making it one of the most reflective bodies of the Solar System. Consequently, its surface temperature at noon only reaches −198 °C, far colder than a light-absorbing body would be. Despite its small size, Enceladus has a wide range of surface features, ranging from old, heavily cratered regions to young, tectonically deformed terrain.
Mimas, also designated Saturn I, is a moon of Saturn discovered in 1789 by William Herschel. It is named after Mimas, a son of Gaia in Greek mythology.
Phoebe is the most massive irregular satellite of Saturn with a mean diameter of 213 km (132 mi). It was discovered by William Henry Pickering on March 18, 1899 from photographic plates that had been taken starting on 16 August 1898 at the Boyden Station of the Carmen Alto Observatory near Arequipa, Peru, by DeLisle Stewart. It was the first satellite to be discovered photographically.
Prometheus is an inner satellite of Saturn. It was discovered in 1980 from photos taken by the Voyager 1 probe, and was provisionally designated S/1980 S 27.
This article provides a timeline of the Cassini–Huygens mission. Cassini was a collaboration between the United States' NASA, the European Space Agency ("ESA"), and the Italian Space Agency ("ASI") to send a probe to study the Saturnian system, including the planet, its rings, and its natural satellites. The Flagship-class uncrewed robotic spacecraft comprised both NASA's Cassini probe, and ESA's Huygens lander which was designed to land on Saturn's largest moon, Titan. Cassini was the fourth space probe to visit Saturn and the first to enter its orbit. The craft were named after astronomers Giovanni Cassini and Christiaan Huygens.
The moons of Saturn are numerous and diverse, ranging from tiny moonlets only tens of meters across to the enormous Titan, which is larger than the planet Mercury. Saturn has 83 known moons with confirmed orbits as of 2023, not counting the many thousands of moonlets embedded within its dense rings as well as hundreds of potential kilometer-sized distant moons that were only briefly seen by telescopes. Seven Saturnian moons are large enough to have collapsed into a relaxed, ellipsoidal shape, though only one or two of those, Titan and possibly Rhea, are currently in hydrostatic equilibrium. Particularly notable among Saturn's moons are Titan, the second-largest moon in the Solar System, with a nitrogen-rich Earth-like atmosphere and a landscape featuring dry river networks and hydrocarbon lakes, Enceladus, which emits jets of ice from its south-polar region and is covered in a deep layer of snow, and Iapetus, with its contrasting black and white hemispheres.
The rings of Saturn are the most extensive ring system of any planet in the Solar System. They consist of countless small particles, ranging in size from micrometers to meters, that orbit around Saturn. The ring particles are made almost entirely of water ice, with a trace component of rocky material. There is still no consensus as to their mechanism of formation. Although theoretical models indicated that the rings were likely to have formed early in the Solar System's history, newer data from Cassini suggested they formed relatively late.
Shikoku Facula is a region of bright material on Saturn's moon Titan.
Lakes of ethane and methane on Titan, Saturn's largest moon, have been detected by the Cassini–Huygens space probe, and had been suspected long before. The large ones are known as maria (seas) and the small ones as lacūs (lakes).
Lofn is a large relatively young impact crater on Jupiter's Galilean satellite Callisto. It was identified in 1997 and named after the goddess of marriage in Norse mythology. Located near the south pole of this moon, Lofn is classified as a flat floored or anomalous dome impact crater. It is superimposed on Adlinda multilayer structure obscuring about 30% of it. Another multi-ring structure—Heimdall is found to the south-west of Lofn.
Doom Mons is the name of a mountain range and its eponymous peak on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. A putative cryovolcano, it is the largest mountain range on Titan by volume, and at 4,757 ft (1,450 m) one of the highest in the Solar System. It was discovered by the Cassini–Huygens probe in 2005 and officially named in 2012.
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