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Iapetus
(redirected from Iapetus (disambiguation))

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Iapetus

One of the larger moons of Saturn, discovered in 1671 by Italian-born French astronomer Giovanni Cassini. It has a diameter of 1,460 km/900 mi and orbits Saturn at an average distance of 3.6 million km/2.2 million mi with a period (the time it takes to circle the planet) of 79.3 days.

As seen from Earth, Iapetus always appears brighter on one side of its orbit than on the other. Voyager probes revealed that the leading hemisphere of Iapetus is very dark, possibly coated with a sooty organic material originating from Saturn's outermost satellite, Phoebe.



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