Saturn's two-faced moon

One hemisphere of Iapetus is very dark, while the other is very bright. Whether the moon is being coated by foreign material or being resurfaced by material from within is not yet known.

Its diameter is about one third that of our own Moon at 1436 kilometres. The latest image was taken in visible light with the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft narrow-angle camera on 3 July 2004, from a distance of 3 million kilometres.

The image scale is 18 kilometres per pixel. The image was magnified by a factor of two to aid visibility.