News Planetary Science

A Titan collision may link Saturn’s tilt, its moon Hyperion and its rings

The collision could also help explain why Saturn fell out of sync with Neptune

An egg-shaped moon covered in irregular craters on a black background

Saturn’s odd moon Hyperion, photographed by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft in 2005, could be debris from a long-ago moon smashup.

JPL-Caltech/NASA, Space Science Institute

By Lisa Grossman

Two of Saturn’s satellites — its largest and one of its weirdest — may owe their current forms and orbits to a two-moon pileup about 400 million years ago.