Our solar system is a fantastically bizarre place. There are worlds as varied as our imagination can grasp -- in fact, they exhibit features we never imagined before we saw them up close. Storms larger than planets, moons with undersurface oceans, lakes of methane, worldlets that occasionally swap places... ... and that's just at Saturn. But of all these, if I had to pick, I'd say the strangest place in the entire solar system would be the ringed planet's distant moon Hyperion. Why? Well, maybe this will help: in September, when the Cassini spacecraft was within just 88,000 km (54,000 miles) of the weird little moon, it snapped this picture:
[Click to entitanate.] Just looking at it, you get a sense of strangeness, don't you? It's little, only about 270 km (170 miles), but packed into that tiny moon is a Universe of weird. It looks like a sponge! Or ...
