Major Moons of the Solar System



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A Moon That Might Have Had Its Own Moon

Saturn's moon Iapetus is just weird. When Giovanni Cassini discovered the moon in 1671, he found that he could see Iapetus only when it was on the west side of the planet; the moon, it turns out, is much darker on one side than the other and is tidally locked with Saturn so that one side always fac...


Phobos, A Martian Moon

This odd-shaped chunk of rock, as imaged by the Mars Express spacecraft last month, is Phobos, the larger of Mars' two moons. The moon is about 27 by 22 by 19 kilometers in size and despite its solid appearance, is about 25 to 35 percent porous (in the 1950s and 1960s, scientists speculated the tha...


Jupiter’s Temporary Moons

How many moons does Jupiter have? The answer may not be as simple as it sounds. Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, is so big that it can deflect the paths of comets and other objects, some of which might otherwise hit the Earth. Some of those comets hit the surface of the gas giant. O...


The Moon Is Shrinking!

We are all familiar with the constant waxing and waning of the moon, the optical result of sunlight illuminating the moon as it orbits around the earth. But Dr. Thomas Watters, a senior scientist with the National Air and Space Museum's Center for Earth and Planetary Studies, has discovered that, i...



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