Triton (moon)
Triton is the largest natural satellite of the planet Neptune, and the first Neptunian moon to be discovered. It is the only large moon in the Solar System with a retrograde orbit, an orbit in the direction opposite to its planet’s rotation. Voyager 2 remains the only spacecraft to visit Trit on.
About Triton (moon) in brief
Triton is the largest natural satellite of the planet Neptune, and the first Neptunian moon to be discovered. The discovery was made on October 10, 1846, by English astronomer William Lassell. It is the only large moon in the Solar System with a retrograde orbit, an orbit in the direction opposite to its planet’s rotation. Triton has a surface of mostly frozen nitrogen, a mostly water-ice crust, an icy mantle and a substantial core of rock and metal. Voyager 2 found surface temperatures of 38 K and also discovered active geysers; Voyager 2 remains the only spacecraft to visit Trit on. The moon is tidally locked with Neptune, so it is almost exactly aligned with its equator. Its orbit precesses forward relative to Neptune’s rotation with a period of about 678 Earth years, making its Neptune-orbit-relative inclination vary between 127° and 173°. As Neptune’s pole turns around the Sun, TritOn’s polar regions take turns facing the Sun. Such changes were observed in 2010, when the other pole moved into the sunlight, then into the other side of Neptune’s orbital plane, and hence at some point each year during Neptune’s year the poles of Uranus and Neptune’s primary are fairly close to each other, almost like the pole points of Neptune and Uranus. The moons of Jupiter and Saturn also have retrograde orbits, but they are much more distant from their primaries, and are small in comparison; the largest of them has only 8% of the diameter of TritON.
The name was first proposed by Camille Flammarion in his 1880 book Astronomie Populaire, and was officially adopted many decades later. Until the discovery of the second moon Nereid in 1949, Tritchon was commonly referred to as \”the satellite of Neptune\”. Lassell did not name his own discovery; he later successfully suggested the name Hyperion, previously chosen by John Herschel, for the eighth moon of Saturn when he discovered it. That is currently 130° with inclination; Tritons orbit is now near its maximum coplanarity with Neptune’s rotation to be synchronous with its orbit around Neptune: it keeps one face almost exactly oriented toward the planet at all times. At the present time, at the present time,. Tritan’s rotational axis is about 40° from Neptune’s Orbital plane, which is the same as the Earth’s. It has a mean density of 2. 061 gcm3, reflecting a composition of approximately 15–35% water ice. Part of its surface has geyser erupting sublimated nitrogen gas, contributing to a tenuous nitrogen atmosphere less than 1⁄70,000 the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere at sea level. It was thought to have been a dwarf planet captured from the Kuiper belt. As a consequence, its surface is relatively young, with few obvious impact craters.
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This page is based on the article Triton (moon) published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 06, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
