Moons of Saturn

Saturn has 285 confirmed moons, the most of any planet in the Solar System. Saturn's moons are diverse in size, ranging from tiny moonlets to Titan, which is larger than the planet Mercury and the second largest moon in the Solar System. Three of these moons possess particularly notable features: Titan has a nitrogen-rich, Earth-like atmosphere and a landscape featuring river networks and hydrocarbon lakes, Enceladus emits jets of ice from its south-polar region and is covered in a deep layer of snow, and Iapetus has contrasting black and white hemispheres as well as an extensive ridge of equatorial mountains which are among the tallest in the Solar System.

Twenty-four of the confirmed moons are regular satellites; they have prograde orbits not greatly inclined to Saturn's equatorial plane (except Iapetus, which has a prograde but significantly inclined orbit). They include the seven rounded satellites, and four small moons that exist in a trojan orbit with some of the large moons. Four orbit inside of the diffuse G ring or between the major moons Mimas and Enceladus. Two moons are mutually co-orbital, Janus and Epimetheus. The relatively large Hyperion is locked in an orbital resonance with Titan. The remaining regular moons orbit near the edges of or within gaps in the main rings, some of which act as shepherd moons of the dense A Ring and the narrow F Ring. The regular satellites are traditionally named after Titans and Titanesses or other figures associated with the mythological Saturn, and one, S/2009 S 1, remains unnamed.

The remaining 261 moons, with mean diameters ranging from 2 to 213 km (1 to 132 mi), orbit much farther from Saturn. They are irregular satellites, which have high orbital inclinations and eccentricities mixed between prograde and retrograde. These moons are probably captured minor planets, or fragments from the collisional breakup of such bodies after they were captured, creating collisional families. The irregular satellites are classified by their orbital characteristics into the prograde Inuit and Gallic groups and the large retrograde Norse group, and their names are chosen from the corresponding mythologies (with the Gallic group corresponding to Celtic mythology). Phoebe, the largest irregular Saturnian moon, is the sole exception to this naming system; it is part of the Norse group but named for a Greek Titaness. As of March 2026, 221 of Saturn's irregular moons are unnamed.

The rings of Saturn are made of objects ranging in size from microscopic to moonlets hundreds of meters across, each in its own orbit around Saturn. The number of moons given above does not include these moonlets, nor hundreds of possible kilometer-sized distant moons that have been observed on single occasions. Thus an absolute number of Saturnian moons cannot be given, because there is no consensus on a boundary between the countless small unnamed objects that form Saturn's ring system and the larger objects that have been named as moons. Over 150 moonlets embedded in the rings have been detected by the disturbance they create in the surrounding ring material, though this is thought to be only a small sample of the total population of such objects.