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Why Is Hyperion Is One Of The Most Irregular Moons In The Solar System?
That’s what it looks like, a big, beat up hockey puck. It is one of the moons of Saturn and it is called Hyperion.
How did this moon get to look like it was run over by a truck? Voyager Two, one of NASA’s space exploring machines, gave scientists a good, close look at Hyperion when it flew past the Saturn system in August 1981.
They saw a huge crater on Hyperion that they think was made about 10 million years ago when Hyperion was involved in a big crash with some other large object in the sky.
This big collision not only left Saturn’s moon looking smashed but changed Hyperion’s position in the sky so that its axis no longer points to its mother planet, Saturn. So far as scientists know, this is the only moon in our solar system with an axis out of whack.
Finding Hyperion such a mess has given some scientists additional reasons to think that earth, itself, may have been hit by large objects from outer space at one time and that such collisions may explain sudden changes that took place in our climate in the past.