Section 7 - Planets and Moons

Valhalla crater is the largest impact basin on this icy, ancient, utterly battered moon.

Callisto

This moon - with its extremely high orbit that rises far above the equator and ring system of Saturn - is a gravitationally captured, burned out comet.

Phoebe

This “ying yang” moon has two incredibly different colored hemispheres: one blazing white and covered in thick glaciers and slabs of ice; the other dark, bare rock.

Iapetus

This icy moon has an incredibly young surface, covered in a thin, crack-riddled sheet of water ice covering a deep, warm, salty ocean.

Europa

A "sulcus" is a deep fissure in the surface of an object (like the wrinkles in a human brain). This tiny Britain-sized moon has a number of features named sulcus: wrinkles in its snowy crust through which water from deep underground seas is currently spraying into space.

Enceladus

This moon is Pluto’s chemical, physical twin.

Triton

This moon is the closest to the surface of its parent planet.

Phobos

This moon is known for its “tiger stripes” patterns, named after the ancient near eastern cities of Baghdad, Damascus, Alexandria, and Cairo. These are like the ridges between tectonic plates on Earth and are deep cracks in the moon’s icy surface which allows its subterranean lakes to spray out into orbit.

Enceladus

This moon looks like an ice and rock jigsaw puzzle, with huge regions that seem misaligned and geologically different. Scientists at one point thought that this moon may have been shattered into large pieces before pulling itself sloppily back together by the influence of its own weak gravity.

Miranda

This major moon would be the best and easiest place to search for life in our Solar System, as the critical necessities of life – namely water in large quantities – seem to exist just below its thin, ocean-sheltering surface glaciers.

Europa

This huge planet is sometimes referred to as Earth’s bodyguard, since it has likely absorbed the impact of hundreds of millions of asteroids and comets over its history.

Jupiter

The planet whose largest moon is closest to the mass of that planet itself.

Earth

This planet’s red color derives from its surface dust’s high iron content. It is literally the rusted planet.

Mars

This is the largest terrestrial planet, also holding the title of the densest planet in the Solar System.

Earth

The surface of this planet is the hottest location on any planet.

Venus

This planet’s massive Galilean moons were the first objects discovered to be definitively orbiting a body other than the Earth.

Jupiter

The only terrestrial planet with multiple moons, though both are only tiny, captured asteroids.

Mars

Neso orbits this planet at a greatest distance of over 70 million kilometers – 2 million kilometers further than Mercury’s distance from the Sun.

Neptune

This moon is home to an area called Xanadu Regio, a region of towering ice mountains carved by flowing liquid rivers and streams of ice cold methane and ethane.

Titan

This large, icy moon will eventually be torn apart by its gas giant parent planet, as its retrograde orbit is causing it to spiral in closer and close to the planet’s surface.

Triton

This moon’s thick atmosphere is composed of nitrogen and is strikingly similar, chemically, to the Earth’s own atmosphere.

Titan

While composed of mostly rock and light weight ices, this is the Solar System’s physically largest moon.

Ganymede

This moon holds the title of greatest distance from its parent planet.

Neso

At nearly 3300 miles in diameter, this moon is 10% larger than Mercury and 85% the diameter of Mars.

Ganymede

This major moon would be the best and easiest place to search for life in our Solar System, as the critical necessities of life – namely water in large quantities – seem to exist just below its thin, ocean-sheltering surface glaciers.

Europa

This planet was discovered using Newton’s laws of physics to pinpoint the location of a gravitational anomaly disturbing the calculated orbit of Caelus. Therefore, it was discovered mathematically before it was ever seen by a telescope.

Neptune

This planet’s red color derives from its surface dust’s high iron content. It is literally the rusted planet.

Mars

The planet which may have suffered a huge ancient collision which left a hemisphere sized crater, as its entire northern hemisphere is several miles depressed below the southern hemisphere. This hemisphere crater might also have been filled with salty water later in the planet's history.