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Phoebe Pictures Released
EccentricAnomaly writes "NASA has begun to release some pictures from Cassini's Phoebe flyby last Friday. If you look at the thumbnail of this image or if you look at the right of these images, you can see a group of craters that look like a skull just south of the equator and something that looks like George Washington (wearing his wig) near the north pole. Come up with some good names for features, and you can submit your ideas to the IAU. There's a process for naming a newly discovered crater, fossa, or sulcus. By the way, the naming convention for Phoebe is people associated with Phoebe or the Greek islands."
Not only is Iapetus one of the moons actually discovered by Cassini (in 1671), but it has one black hemisphere and one white hemisphere. It is thought that dust accumulated from Pheobe is responsible for the coating on the darker hemisphere. Intriguingly, there is also a small black dot in the middle of the white hemisphere, exactly as described in 2001 (the book, not the film)...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Not a good idea.
Eventually he'd get bored and start giving out names like "megagalaxusprimord", "hypertron" , "honeyiloveyoupleasedontleave" , "ihatethisjob", "imastar" and "uranus" .
Not to worry though! You can name your very own star here. Just don't come back to me when the aliens find out what you named their mother (earth)
May the Maths Be with you!
Well, since the colour of Iapetus' dark hemisphere is a different hue than Phoebe's, that theory is in question. See Space.com's page on Iapetus.
Damn those pesky terrorists
The pictures mentioned earlier are still not taken from the closest point to Phoebe.
In the Imaging Diary you'll find the latest pictures, amongst which one taken from 2365 kilometers (1,470 miles).