Space · Moons

Pasiphae

A moon of Jupiter — The largest of Jupiter's retrograde irregular moons — orbits Jupiter backward at extreme distance.

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Quick facts

Parent planet

Jupiter

Diameter (mean)

60 km

Mass

3.0 × 10¹⁷ kg
4.1e-06 Moon masses

Mean orbital radius

23,624,000 km

Orbital period

743.6 Earth days

Discovery year

1908

Discoverer

Philibert Jacques Melotte

Naming origin

Wife of Minos, mother of the Minotaur

Surface conditions

Pasiphae is an irregular body 60 km across, the largest of Jupiter's retrograde outer satellites (the Pasiphae group). Its orbit is so distant (23.6 million km, nearly a third of the way to the Sun from Jupiter) and so inclined that Pasiphae has been disturbed by solar gravity into one of the most chaotic moon orbits known. No spacecraft has imaged it at resolved scale.

Missions and observations

Every Jupiter-system mission has had an opportunity to image or characterize Pasiphae. The list below is the Jupiter-system mission catalog; specific Pasiphae encounters are documented in mission archives.

Mission	Year at Jupiter	Status
Pioneer 10 NASA	1973	Completed
Pioneer 11 NASA	1974	Completed
Voyager 1 NASA	1979	Completed
Voyager 2 NASA	1979	Completed
Ulysses NASA/ESA	1992	Completed
Galileo NASA	1995	Completed
Cassini-Huygens NASA/ESA/ASI	2000	Completed
New Horizons NASA	2007	Completed
Juno NASA	2016	Active
Europa Clipper NASA	2030	On the way
JUICE ESA	2031	On the way

Naming etymology

Pasiphae was the wife of King Minos of Crete and the mother, by a divine bull, of the Minotaur. The IAU adopted the name in 1975.

Methodology & sources

Diameter, mass, and orbital parameters from JPL Solar System Dynamics — Physical Parameters. Discovery year and discoverer from the JPL Satellite Discovery Circumstances. Naming etymology from the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature. Stylized SVG hero composed from NASA / JPL imagery as visual reference; no photographs are reproduced.