The Cassini orbiter mission has revealed some absolutely stunning pictures of Saturn and its moons, and now it’s branching into video as well. Here’s color video of Hyperion, a very strange moon located 800 million miles from Earth.
Here’s the video which shows Hyperion floating through the blackness of space. It’s pretty eerie and powerful, particularly when you remember this isn’t a special effect but an actual event that very recently occurred:
Hyperion itself is one of the stranger moons in the solar system. It was the first irregular moon ever discovered, and it looks more than a little like a giant space potato. It’s the second-largest non-spherical object in the solar system, and its precise origins remain a mystery. It rotates chaotically, meaning its axis of rotation wobbles around so much that there’s no way to predict its orientation in space ahead of time. It also looks a lot like sponge thanks to its deep, sharp craters, which again nobody can quite explain.
You know what? Under the circumstances, it’s probably best to sit back, forget about all we don’t know, and just watch the cool video. We’ll let science figure out all that stuff some other time.
[via Discover]
* Technically it’s actually a bunch of still images taken in quick succession stitched together, but then that’s basically what video is anyway.
