What lies at the bottom of Hyperion's strange
craters? Nobody's
sure. To help find out, the robot
Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn swooped past the sponge-textured
moon in 2005 and 2010 and took images of
unprecedented detail. An image from the 2005 pass, shown above in
false color, shows a remarkable world strewn with strange craters and a generally odd surface. The
slight
differences in color likely show differences in surface composition. At the
bottom of most craters lies some type of unknown dark
material. Inspection of the image shows bright
features indicating that the dark material might be only tens of meters thick in
some places. Hyperion is about
250 kilometers across, rotates chaotically
, and
has a density so low that it might house a vast
system of caverns inside.
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