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What are your top 3 moons?


DMSP

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Damn that's a tough one.

Anyway, our Moon, definitely. Not because it's the most intrinsically interesting, but because you can look at it yourself through a modest telescope and it really comes alive as another world, filling the field of view. It's the only thing that does; the Sun doesn't really have terrain as such, and all the other planets are too far away.

Titan. Another easy choice, with its thick atmosphere and active methane cycle, and the whole flying thing.

The third choice, though, that's tough. I will get one thing out of the way: not Europa. It's been hyped up as a possible home of life, but it's become increasingly apparent that it's far from unique in having a subsurface ocean. The extraordinarily distinctive Miranda, once thought to be shattered and reformed but that may owe its features to its own geology.

So, Io with its intense vulcanism? Ganymede because it's lolhueg, well and that intruiging two-tone surface. "That's no moon" Mimas? Enceladus with its geysers? Janus and Epimetheus (OK that's two) in their delicate co-orbital dance? The yin-yang of Iapetus and its equatorial ridge, a moon readers of 2001 will remember well. Triton, the largest irregular satellite in the solar system and with unusual terrain? It's so hard to choose!

But I think I'm going to go with Hyperion. It just looks so weird with its spongelike texture, there truly is nothing else even remotely like it. It's also the only large(ish) body to not have a definite rotation axis, instead tumbling chaotically. If you were to visit, you literally wouldn't know where the equator would be until you got there.

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