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· 5 min read

Tethys is the latest entry in our quarterly rollup series. It branches off from our main rolling Voyager development into a fixed target for our partners to qualify and build upon.

Tethys is a moon of Saturn and is named after the Titan from Greek mythology. The best photos and scientific data about Tethys come from the 2015 visit by the Cassini spacecraft, named after Giovanni Cassini who discovered Tethys in the 1680s. Tethys was thought to be the closest moon to Saturn for 100 years, until Mimas and Enceladus were discovered in the 1780s, pushing Tethys out to third place. Tethys' orbit is still close enough to Saturn that it passes right through Saturn's magnetosphere. On Earth this would make for a dazzling aurora, but Saturn's auroras are only visible in UV light.

Tethys is a lot smaller than our own moon, at only 1% of the mass, and it seems to be almost entirely made of water ice. The nearby moon Enceladus has geysers that spray ice out into space, and this tends to create a thin ring around Saturn of ice particles. Tethys orbits right through this area and is sandblasted by these ice particles, making Tethys extremely shiny and and reflective.

As for the software, Comet 24.8.0 Tethys brings 7 new features and 25 enhancements, including support for advanced Windows metadata; granular restore from Linux filesystems; additional retry features; the ability to bulk convert from Storage Role to direct-to-cloud storage; and much more.