You Can’t Land on Saturn's Moon Hyperion

Hyperion. The largest of  Saturn’s irregular moons. It tumbles through the void, one and a half million kilometres  from its parent planet, spinning with a chaotic motion that makes its  future orientation almost impossible to predict.

Unlike many of Saturn’s other 292 confirmed moons, it isn’t smooth and round, but  jagged, porous and irregular, like a giant, frozen, cosmic sponge.

It’s a world that defies almost every  conventional rule of planetary science. But why? Voyager found hints of a violent past;  a great crater visible from afar.

But it wasn’t until Cassini explored  Hyperion in 2005 that it all became clear. Complex gravitational interactions,  ancient proto-moon collisions and an unusual composition make this arguably the strangest  place in the Saturn system.

Oh, and did I mention it has the power to  “zap” you with electricity from 2000 km away? Yes, you did hear me right.

I’m Alex McColgan, and you’re watching Astrum. Join me today as we venture a billion kilometres  from Earth to this extraordinary moon, exploring the violent history of its birth, the maths behind its chaotic motion, and the incredible discovery that Hyperion  can dish out electric shocks in space.

To understand Hyperion, we must first  look back to the mid-19th century, a golden age for observational astronomy, when our understanding of the  geography of the Solar System skyrocketed thanks to an explosion of tech  and precision instrumentation in the 1840s.

With teams all around the world making new  discoveries, finding Hyperion was actually not a singular event, but a two-way transatlantic  tie. On the evening of the 16th of September 1848, at the Harvard College Observatory, the American  father-and-son team of William and George Bond

spotted a faint object that did not appear on  any existing charts of the Saturnian satellites. William Cranch Bond was a well respected  astronomer. Whilst he had a lack of formal education, he worked his way up to  become the first director of the

Harvard Observatory. He was utilising its new  15-inch equatorial refractor, one of the most powerful instruments in the world at the time,  when he and his son first spotted Hyperion.

It was just two nights later, thousands of  kilometres across the Atlantic that William Lassell - a wealthy British brewer  who had turned his fortunes toward the stars - made the same discovery using a  24-inch speculum reflector of his own design.

Thankfully, the resulting “dispute” was less of  a conflict and more of a celebration of human ingenuity. Because the observations were so close  in time, the astronomical community eventually settled on a rare triple-credit discovery,  honouring both Bonds and Lassell together.