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So Long, Hyperion, and Thanks for all the Pits
Saturn’s moon Hyperion looks more like a frosted honeycomb or cosmic kitchen sponge than just another cratered old sphere. In fact, the 360-kilometer long moon is one of the more bizarre-looking objects in the solar system. On May 31, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft took its last good look at the strange little world.
From 34,000 kilometers away, Cassini snapped its final closeups of oblong Hyperion. Earlier in its tour of the Saturnian system, the spacecraft had revealed for the first time the true extent of Hyperion’s weirdness, which had only been hinted at in Voyager 2 observations. Those Cassini images, shot in 2005, have since become iconic views of a moon that really is unlike anything