STRANGEST MOONS in the solar system

Some of the most fascinating worlds in our cosmic neighbourhood are not planets, but the moons that orbit around them

- Giles Sparrow

All but two of our Solar System’s planets have satellites of one sort or another. Earth’s own Moon, a beautiful but stark, dead world shaped by ancient volcanoes and countless impact craters, is undoubtedly the most familiar, but it’s far from being the most interesting.

Each of the outer Solar System’s giant planets is accompanied by a large retinue of satellites, many of which formed at the same time and from the same ice-rich material as the planets that host them. Although far from the Sun and starved of solar heat and light, they nevertheless show as much variety as the planets themselves.

Here All About Space takes a trip to visit some of the strangest and most exciting of these astonishing worlds. Some, such as Jupiter’s Callisto and Saturn’s Mimas, have been frozen solid for billions of years but bear extraordinary scars from exposure to bombardment from space. Others, such as Saturn’s shepherd moons Pan and Atlas and Neptune’s lonely Nereid, have been affected throughout their history by interactions with their neighbours.