Table of Contents
What is the diameter of Tethys?
1,062 km
Tethys/Diameter
Does Tethys have moons?
Tethys has gravitationally locked two smaller moons into its own subsystem — Telesto and Calypso. These smaller moons are held in Lagrangian points (L4 and L5, respectively), where objects are stable with the larger controlling body.
What is the surface of Tethys like?
The surface of Tethys mostly consists of hilly cratered terrain dominated by craters more than 40 km in diameter. A smaller portion of the surface is represented by the smooth plains on the trailing hemisphere. There are also a number of tectonic features such as chasmata and troughs.
What is Tethys made of?
A frozen surface Like many of the satellites around Saturn, Tethys is made up almost entirely of water-ice. At average temperatures of minus 187 degrees C (minus 305 degrees F), the ice on the lunar surface responds much like rock.
How far away is Tethys from the sun?
approximately 503,000 miles
North on Tethys is up and rotated 33 degrees to the right. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 15, 2013. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 503,000 miles (809,000 kilometers) from Tethys.
How was Rhea discovered?
Discovery and naming Rhea is one of the four moons discovered by Italian astronomer Giovanni Cassini. He spotted the icy moon on Dec. 23, 1672. It was the second moon he observed, and the third to be found in orbit around the ringed planet.
Why are scientists so interested in Titan?
It takes only two ingredients in the atmosphere — methane and nitrogen — to unleash a complex web of organic chemistry that makes Titan unique and interesting to scientists. Thus, scientists are eager to see which compounds are on Titan and whether they are similar to the ones that could have seeded life on Earth.
How far is Tethys from Earth?
1.272 billion km
Tethys/Distance to Earth
How far is Tethys from the sun?
The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 503,000 miles (809,000 kilometers) from Tethys.
Where is Tethys located?
A vast ocean, called the Tethys Ocean, lay south of Europe and Asia and north of Africa, Arabia, and India. Much of the rock that now forms the mountain system, which includes the Alps and the Himalayas was deposited on the margins of the Tethys Ocean.
How big is Tethys compared to the Earth?
Tethys Statistics Discovered by Giovanni Domenico Cassini Date of discovery 1684 Mass (kg) 7.55e+20 Mass (Earth = 1) 1.2634e-04 Equatorial radius (km) 530
What kind of life did the Tethys Sea have?
The Tethys Sea teemed with life, which thrived in the warm, subtropical waters. There were many ammonites, sea lilies, bivalves, sea cucumbers and corals. They were part of a food pyramid and were preyed upon by marine reptiles with big, scary beaks, such as the ichthyosaurus (picture below) and the plesiosaurus (title picture).
Is the Tethys Sea part of the Indian Ocean?
The Tethys Ocean / ˈtiːθɪs, ˈtɛθɪs / (Greek: Τηθύς Tēthús), also called the Tethys Sea or the Neo-Tethys, was an ocean during much of the Mesozoic Era located between the ancient continents of Gondwana and Laurasia, before the opening of the Indian and Atlantic oceans during the Cretaceous Period.
How did the Tethys mountains get its name?
These mountains were created by continental collisions that eventually eliminated the sea. Tethys was named in 1893, by the Austrian geologist Eduard Suess, after the sister and consort of Oceanus, the ancient Greek god of the ocean.