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Mimas's low density, 1.15 g/cm 3, indicates that it is composed mostly of water ice with only a small amount of rock, and study of Mimas's motion suggests that it may have a liquid ocean beneath its surface ice. The surface of Mimas is heavily cratered and shows little signs of recent geological activity.
An internal ocean's presence implies a strong heat source inside Mimas that turned ice into an ocean. Mimas follows an elliptical orbit around Saturn at an average distance of about 115,000 miles ...
This is a list of named geological features on Mimas, a moon that orbits the planet Saturn. Mimantean features are named after people and places in Arthurian legend or the legends of the Titans . The sole exception to this is Herschel Crater , named after William Herschel , the astronomer who discovered Mimas in 1789.
The similarity between Mimas's appearance and the Death Star in Star Wars due to the large size of Herschel has often been noted, both in the press and in NASA/JPL press releases. [ 6 ] [ 7 ] This is a coincidence, however, as the crater's similarities were not discovered until 1980 after Voyager 1 gained line of sight, three years after the ...
This is Mimas, the smallest of Saturn's major moons. Other than its giant impact crater, scientists thought Mimas was a rather boring piece of cold rock. Now, a new study says Mimas is much more ...
What is probably the world's oldest ice, dating back 1.2m years ago, has been dug out from deep within Antarctica. Working at temperatures of -35C, a team of scientists extracted a 2.8km-long ...
The present-day radiogenic heating rate is 3.2 × 10 15 ergs/s (or 0.32 gigawatts), assuming Enceladus has a composition of ice, iron and silicate materials. [6] Heating from long-lived radioactive isotopes uranium-238, uranium-235, thorium-232 and potassium-40 inside Enceladus would add 0.3 gigawatts to the observed heat flux. [123]
This suspicion is caused because of the unusually high level of water vapor in the thin atmosphere of Ganymede. The moon likely has several layers of ice and liquid water, and finally a liquid layer in contact with the mantle. The core, the likely cause of Ganymede's magnetic field, would have a temperature near 1600 K.