In the Solar System · tracked live
Triton
Neptune's largest moon, and it goes round the wrong way: against the planet's spin, on a tilted orbit, which a moon formed in place cannot do. So it was captured - almost certainly a body from the Kuiper belt, a cousin of Pluto. Voyager 2 photographed it in 1989 and saw nitrogen geysers on a surface at −235 °C, among the coldest ever measured. Its backward orbit is slowly shrinking, and Neptune will one day tear it apart.
- Radius
- 1,353 km
- Around the equator
- 8,504 km
- From the Sun
- 4,469,361,014 km (+220,939 km/d)
- From the Earth
- 4,324,333,322 km (+905,317 km/d)
- A signal takes
- 4 h
- Goes round
- Neptune
- Placed to within
- 493 km
Distances and speed are computed from JPL Horizons trajectories and are true of the date below, changing at the rate beside each.
Everything the map shows is worked out in your browser from published orbital data - nothing on it is a stored picture of where things were.