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Jump26of 100 · 1,280 M km from Earth

Hyperion: a tumbling sponge

Hyperion looks like a sponge, may be 40% empty and tumbles with no pattern. In 2005 it gave Cassini an electric shock. Facts with sources.

Hyperion, a potato-shaped moon with deep craters that make it look like a sponge, photographed by Cassini
Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute · original

Curious facts

  1. A potato that looks like a sponge

    It measures about 410 × 260 × 220 km, and its surface, full of deep craters, looks like a sponge or a wasp nest. 1

  2. Almost half of it may be empty

    Its density is slightly more than half that of water. NASA explains it with ice full of gaps: more than 40% of its interior could be empty space. 1

  3. It tumbles with no pattern

    It does not spin regularly: it tumbles unpredictably as it orbits Saturn. That chaotic spin was predicted in 1984 from Voyager data. 12

  4. An electric shock from 2,000 km

    On 26 September 2005, during a flyby, Hyperion sent a beam of electrons at the Cassini probe. According to JPL, it was like the spacecraft getting a 200-volt shock, even though they were more than 2,000 km apart. 3

Hyperion in Orbit

In the game, Hyperion is jump 26 of the route, 1,280 M km from Earth. Its logbook card says:

Logbook · Jump 26

Looks like a sponge and tumbles chaotically

I want to try Orbit Already in the group: download

Two steps with the Google account you use on Play: join the group, then download the test. Google Play can take a while, sometimes more than an hour, before it lets you download it; if you see “Item not found”, wait and try again.

What Orbit is like

Sources

  1. NASA, Hyperion. science.nasa.gov/saturn/moons/hyperion
  2. Wisdom, Peale and Mignard, Icarus 58 (1984). ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19850036738
  3. NASA JPL, 2014. jpl.nasa.gov/news/cassini-caught-in-hyperions-particle-beam

Checked between 8 and 11 October 2026.

Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute · original