Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Naiad, the closest regular moon, is also the second smallest among the inner moons (following the discovery of Hippocamp), whereas Proteus is the largest regular moon and the second largest moon of Neptune. The first five moons orbit much faster than Neptune's rotation itself ranging from 7 hours for Naiad and Thalassa, to 13 hours for Larissa.
Triton is the largest natural satellite of the planet Neptune. It is the only moon of Neptune massive enough to be rounded under its own gravity and hosts a thin, hazy atmosphere. Triton orbits Neptune in a retrograde orbit—revolving in the opposite direction to the parent planet's rotation—the only large moon in the Solar System to do so.
An annotated picture of Neptune's many moons as captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. The bright blue diffraction star is Triton, Neptune's largest moon. Neptune has 16 known moons. [154] Triton is the largest Neptunian moon, accounting for more than 99.5% of the mass in orbit around Neptune, [i] and is the only one massive enough to be ...
The James Webb Space Telescope's first images of Neptune, the mysterious ice giant that orbits in the far reaches of the outer solar system, were so New Neptune photos offer rare views of planet ...
The bright S/2002 N5 moon is 14 miles (23 kilometers) in diameter and takes nearly nine years to complete an orbit of Neptune, while faint S/2021 N1 is about 8.7 miles (14 kilometers) across and ...
Proteus was discovered from the images taken by the Voyager 2 space probe two months before its Neptune flyby in August 1989. Proteus was discovered 40 years after the discovery of Neptune's moon Nereid in 1949. [14] Upon discovery, Proteus received the temporary provisional designation S/1989 N 1. [15]
On January 14, 2005, the tiny Huygens probe—an integral facet of NASA’s Cassini mission—floated down through a thick haze and onto a sandy riverbed on the surface of Saturn’s largest moon.
Animation of Psamathe moving in images by Very Large Telescope on 13 July 2010 Psamathe is about 38 kilometers in diameter. It orbits Neptune at a distance of between 25.7 and 67.7 million km (for comparison, the Sun- Mercury distance varies between 46 million and 69.8 million km) and requires almost 25 Earth years to make one orbit.