Telesto is a

moon The Moon is Earth's only natural satellite. It is the fifth largest satellite in the Solar System and the largest and most massive relative to its parent planet, with a diameter about one-quarter that of Earth (comparable to the width of ...

Saturn Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second-largest in the Solar System, after Jupiter. It is a gas giant with an average radius of about nine and a half times that of Earth. It has only one-eighth the average density of Earth; h ...

. It was discovered by Smith, Reitsema, Larson and Fountain in 1980 from ground-based observations, and was provisionally designated . In the following months, several other apparitions were observed: , , and . In 1983 it was officially named after Telesto of

Greek mythology A major branch of classical mythology, Greek mythology is the body of myths originally told by the Ancient Greece, ancient Greeks, and a genre of Ancient Greek folklore. These stories concern the Cosmogony, origin and Cosmology#Metaphysical co ...

. It is also designated as or Tethys B. Telesto is co-orbital with Tethys, residing in Tethys' leading

Lagrangian point In celestial mechanics, the Lagrange points (; also Lagrangian points or libration points) are points of equilibrium for small-mass objects under the influence of two massive orbiting bodies. Mathematically, this involves the solution of th ...

(). This relationship was first identified by Seidelmann ''et al.'' in 1981. Another moon, Calypso, resides in the other (trailing) Lagrangian point of Tethys, 60 degrees in the other direction from Tethys. The Saturnian system has two additional trojan moons.

Exploration

The '' Cassini'' probe performed a distant flyby of Telesto on October 11, 2005. The resulting images show that its surface is surprisingly smooth, devoid of small impact craters. __NOTOC__

Citations

References

* * * * * * * *

External links

NASA - Telesto Profile

NASA's Solar System Exploration

{{DEFAULTSORT:Telesto (Moon) Moons of Saturn Trojan moons 19800408 Moons with a prograde orbit