Nereid
Neptune II
Nereid [NEER-ee-ed] was discovered in 1949 by astronomer Gerard Kuiper.
Nereid is about 340 kilometers (210 miles) in diameter and is so far
from Neptune that it requires 360 days to make one orbit. Voyager's
best photos of Nereid were taken from about 4.7 million kilometers (2.9
million miles). The photos show that the moon's surface reflects about
14 percent of the sunlight that strikes it, making it somewhat more
reflective than Earth's Moon, and more than twice as reflective as
Proteus. Nereid's orbit is the most eccentric
in the solar system. Its distance to Neptune ranges from about 1,353,600
kilometers (841,100 miles) to 9,623,700 kilometers (5,980,200 miles).
Nereid Statistics |
Discovered by | Gerard Kuiper |
Date of discovery | 1949 |
Mass (kg) | ? |
Equatorial radius (km) | 170 |
Equatorial radius (Earth = 1) | 2.6654e-02 |
Mean density (gm/cm^3) | ? |
Mean distance from Neptune (km) | 5,513,400 |
Rotational period (days) | ? |
Orbital period (days) | 360.1362 |
Mean orbital velocity (km/sec) | 1.12 |
Orbital eccentricity | 0.7512 |
Orbital inclination (degrees) | 27.6 |
Visual geometric albedo | 0.14 |
Magnitude (Vo) | 18.7 |
Neptune
Triton
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