Links
- Wikipedia
- Methone on Wikipedia
Methone
Details
Methone is a tiny, egg-shaped moon of Saturn with an unusually smooth surface, likely mantled in mobile, low-density icy material. It orbits between Mimas and Enceladus and helps supply the faint Methone Ring Arc with dust knocked loose by impacts.
Methone matters because it is a tiny moon with an unexpectedly delicate surface. Cassini saw a small, egg-shaped body whose smoothness is unusual for an exposed object only a few kilometers across. Instead of looking battered and sharply cratered, Methone appears mantled by loose, low-density icy material.
That surface points back to Saturn's ring-and-moon environment. Methone orbits between Mimas and Enceladus, where small impacts can knock dust from tiny moons into faint arcs of material. Its own Methone Ring Arc makes the moon part of Saturn's fine structure, not just a small body moving through empty space.
That is why Methone belongs on this scale. It shows that even a moon under four kilometers long can record active relationships with rings, dust, impacts, and nearby satellites. Methone is small, but it helps make Saturn's inner system feel like a connected physical environment.
1.70km
Visual creditCassini 2012 / NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute / Public domainSource: Wikimedia Commons
Key facts
- Category
- Moons
- Object class
- Small inner moon
- Composition
- Low-density water ice and regolith
Scale context
Where Methone sits on the full axis
By size on the journey, Methone sits between 103P/Hartley 2 and 4179 Toutatis. The band below compares Methone with nearby Small inner moon objects so the size jump stays easy to read.
Together, these objects make the size change around Methone easy to compare at a glance.
Sources
References for Methone
Measurements and descriptive context are compiled by the Scale of Space team from the references below. If you find an error, please let us know.
- Methone — Wikipedia
- Visual reference: Wikimedia Commons (Cassini 2012 / NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute, Public domain)
Between the smallest and the largest, perspective is everything.
About
Scale of Space is a scroll-based journey through the universe, placing objects on a single logarithmic scale so you can compare size across an unbroken range.
Guides turn parts of that scale into curated essays, while focused views let you explore the same range through specific groups of objects.