Moons of the solar system

The giant planets each carry a system of their own. These moons orbit at their real periods and real distances, so you can watch Io race around Jupiter in under two days while Callisto takes more than a fortnight.

Several are among the most interesting places in the solar system: buried oceans on Europa and Enceladus, methane rivers on Titan, active volcanoes on Io.

Moons of the solar system — all 37 objects

• Amalthea — A deep-red lump skimming just above Jupiter’s cloud tops, dyed by sulfur blasted off Io and stretched by…
• Ariel — Valleys and faults crisscross its young, bright face.
• Atlas — A flying saucer in orbit: ring dust settling onto Atlas’s equator built the smooth disc that makes it one of…
• Callisto — An ancient face unchanged for four billion years — every scar of the early solar system still on display.
• Calypso — Tethys’s trailing companion, holding station forever 60 degrees behind in the same orbit.
• Charon — So large relative to Pluto that the pair waltz around a point between them — the solar system’s great double…
• Daphnis — A five-mile moonlet that carves the Keeler Gap, raising kilometre-high waves in the ring edges that cast…
• Deimos — Mars’s tiny outer moon — from the surface it would look like a bright, slow star.
• Dione — Bright ice cliffs streak its face where the crust fractured long ago.
• Enceladus — The brightest world in the solar system, venting its buried ocean into space — Cassini flew through the…
• Epimetheus — Half of the solar system’s only co-orbital pair: every four years Epimetheus and Janus close in on each…
• Europa — Beneath a cracked shell of ice lies twice as much liquid water as all Earth’s oceans — one of the most…
• Ganymede — A planet in all but name: bigger than Mercury, with its own magnetic field and a buried ocean of its own.
• Helene — Dione’s leading trojan, its surface streaked by flows of ultra-fine dust that behave almost like a liquid in…
• Hyperion — The sponge moon: so porous that impacts punch in rather than splash out, and tumbling so chaotically that no…
• Iapetus — The yin-yang moon: one side black as soot, the other white as snow, with a mountain ridge circling its…
• Io — A world being kneaded alive: Jupiter’s gravity pumps so much heat into Io that it constantly turns itself…
• Janus — The larger of the co-orbital twins, waltzing with Epimetheus in a gravitational do-si-do that has repeated…
• Larissa — A dark, cratered relic of Neptune’s original moons, shattered and reassembled after Triton’s violent arrival.
• Mimas — The Death Star moon — the impact that dug Herschel crater nearly shattered it.
• Miranda — A patchwork world that looks shattered and reassembled, home to the tallest cliff in the solar system.
• Moon — Born from a planet-sized impact 4.5 billion years ago, the Moon stabilizes Earth’s tilt and raises its tides.
• Oberon — The outermost of the classical Uranian moons, scarred and still.
• Pan — The innermost shepherd moon, sweeping the Encke Gap clear as it goes. Ring dust piled onto its equator gives…
• Pandora — The F ring’s outer guardian, herding the narrow ring from outside while Prometheus works the inner edge.
• Phobos — A captured lump of rubble racing around Mars three times a day, so low that Mars’s tides are slowly reeling…
• Phoebe — Saturn’s outcast: a captured Kuiper Belt body circling backwards far beyond the regular moons, shedding the…
• Prometheus — The F ring’s inner shepherd — a potato-shaped moon that dips into the ring each orbit, dragging out dark…
• Proteus — Bigger than Mimas yet still a lump: Proteus sits right at the size where gravity almost — but not quite…
• Rhea — A quiet, heavily cratered ice world — possibly with the only ring system ever suspected around a moon.
• Telesto — A smooth, dust-mantled moonlet camped in the Lagrange point ahead of Tethys — one of only four trojan moons…
• Tethys — An icy ball split nearly pole-to-pole by a vast canyon.
• Thebe — A battered inner moon whose knocked-off dust forms one of Jupiter’s faint gossamer rings.
• Titan — The only moon with a thick atmosphere and the only world beyond Earth with liquid on its surface — rivers…
• Titania — Largest of the five — canyons longer than the Grand Canyon cut its icy shell.
• Triton — Neptune’s stolen moon: a captured Kuiper Belt object orbiting backwards, with nitrogen geysers erupting…
• Umbriel — A dark, ancient ball with one mysterious bright ring — the “fluorescent cheerio” of Wunda crater.

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