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In 1899, William Henry Pickering discovered Phoebe, a highly irregular satellite that does not rotate synchronously with Saturn as the larger moons do. [156] Phoebe was the first such satellite found and it took more than a year to orbit Saturn in a retrograde orbit. During the early 20th century, research on Titan led to the confirmation in ...
In gravitationally bound systems, the orbital speed of an astronomical body or object (e.g. planet, moon, artificial satellite, spacecraft, or star) is the speed at which it orbits around either the barycenter (the combined center of mass) or, if one body is much more massive than the other bodies of the system combined, its speed relative to the center of mass of the most massive body.
It is Saturn's ninth-largest moon, but it is the eighth-most massive. Hyperion, another one of Saturn's moons, has a larger radius, but is less massive than Phoebe. Phoebe rotates every nine hours and 16 minutes, and completes a full orbit around Saturn in about 18 months. Its surface temperature is on average 75 K (−198.2 °C).
Saturn doesn't have any easily visible landmarks to track, and its gassy atmosphere doesn't offer many hints as to how fast it's actually rotating. On top of that, its magnetic field also hides ...
In many cases, the spacecraft may be first placed in a parking orbit (e.g. a low Earth orbit at 160–2,000 km) and then accelerated to the escape velocity at that altitude, which will be slightly lower (about 11.0 km/s at a low Earth orbit of 200 km).
The full set of rings, imaged as Saturn eclipsed the Sun from the vantage of the Cassini orbiter, 1.2 million km (¾ million miles) distant, on 19 July 2013 (brightness is exaggerated). Earth appears as a dot at 4 o'clock, between the G and E rings. The rings of Saturn are the most extensive and complex ring system of any planet in the Solar ...
In science class, we always learned that all the planets in our solar system orbit around the sun. Scientists have figured out this is not necessarily true. Jupiter actually does not orbit the sun
During this passage Saturn's gravity caused Chiron's semi-major axis to decrease from 14.55 ± 0.12 AU [34] to 13.7 AU. [6] Chiron's orbit does not intersect Uranus' orbit. Chiron attracted considerable interest because it was the first object discovered in such an orbit, well outside the asteroid belt.