Discovery of Greip

Greip is a small irregular moon of Saturn, about six kilometres across, which follows a distant, tilted and elongated orbit in the direction opposite to Saturn's rotation. It was discovered in 2006 by a team led by Scott Sheppard, who used large telescopes in Hawaii to search for faint moons around the giant planets. It belongs to the Norse group of Saturn's satellites, which are probably fragments of a larger body that was captured by the planet and later broken up in collisions. Following the convention for moons of this group, it was named after a figure from Norse mythology, the giantess Greip, said to be one of the nine mothers of the god Heimdall.

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