Rough and Tumble Hyperion Movie

A CLOSER LOOK

The tumbling and irregularly shaped moon Hyperion rotates away from the Cassini spacecraft in this movie taken during a distant encounter in Dec. 2005. A shadow closes over the large crater at bottom as the movie progresses. Hyperion (280 kilometers, or 174 miles across) is covered with closely packed and deeply etched pits. The warming action of the Sun on water ice lying beneath a darkened layer of surface material apparently has deepened and exaggerated the depressions already created by impacts. Cassini scientists now think that Hyperion’s unusual appearance can be attributed to the fact that it has an unusually low density for such a large object, giving it weak surface gravity and high porosity. These characteristics help preserve the original shapes of Hyperion’s craters by limiting

Explore NASA's original image record for credits and available downloads.