Abstract
The first planetary satellites (other than our own Moon) were discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610. These were the four largest moons of Jupiter: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. Christiaan Huygens followed suit in 1655 by discovering Titan, Saturn's largest satellite; a few years later, Giovanni Cassini was the first to observe several of Saturn's smaller moons, as well as the main gap in its rings. It is Titan that stands out, however. Called at first “Luna saturni” and only given its modern name by John Herschel in 1848, Titan is the most massive satellite in the solar system. With a diameter of 5151 km, it dwarfs the other 60-odd moons of Saturn, and is even larger than the planet Mercury.
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