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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."
Aparently these moons occupy two of the most chaotic orbits in the solar system so it's no surprize that they should end up on the front page of slashdot.
May the Maths Be with you!
Really, I mean it: this is an ancient bit of rock whirling about in space, and we can study it from the comfort of home. Perversely, images like this always remind me that life is so short; doesn't anyone else see things like this and feel disheartened at mortality ? There is so much I will never have time to know, still less understand.
sorta offtopic, but I just finished with the two lastest BSD articles, and when I got to this one, and with the heavy image loads and whatnot, and now not only being slashdotted but also being referenced in a ton of other online news places, etc, I figured I'd take a peek and see what is that site running? at netcraft. Hmm, well neither BSD nor linux, it's running solaris 8 using netscape server. Just a FWIW.
Not being a native English speaker, could someone clear this up for me?
How do you pronounce Phoebe? I've been saying it as 'foe-bay'. Is this correct? Horribly wrong?
Life immitated art. The unusual colouration was known about for a long while - Cassini himself observed it when the moon seemed to "disappear" - and is a reason why Clark chose Iapetus for the location of the monolith. However, while the novel was written in the late 1960s, the anomaly in the pale surface was only detected by the Voyager flybys. There is a comment about the "black dot" in the foreward of one of the sequels, I forget which one, but Clark received a photo of the anomaly from NASA with the comment "Thinking of you..." or words to that effect.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Actually, I take that back. It's more of a Slashdot-we're-nerds sort of thinking to know offhand that they're bogus, but if you ever see one of those advertisements, they really seem legit: "Your star will be registered in the A.E.A.S.C. database" or whatever - that can mean "some excel file somewhere." They make users think they are officially naming the celestial body.
You'd have just as much sucess with an ad "Name an orphan in Liberia after your sweetheart! It'll be registered in L.O.L. database!" - it'd have just as much "official-ness."
I guess you're better off printing your own "star" coordinates off your own computer and save the $39.99...
Yeah, but debris from impacts with Phoebe may be the source of some of the newly discovered small moons of Saturn: Skadi, Paaliaaq, Albiorix, Suttug, etc..
btw, a mythology search show Suttug has the best story, he's a Dwarf that stole the mead of inspiration from the Gods.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Actually, we usually hire undergrads to do this (@ $6/hr). It doesn't cost very much at all. We also only name the features that end up discussed in scientific papers (so we can refer to them as something other than "the crater north and slightly west of the previously discussed crater").
NASA's recent observations of Phoebe seem to call that into doubt. Phoebe appears to be a block of ice covered by a dark layer of dust. In short, it seems that Phoebe is itself simply coated from some external source. The real question is, "where is this dust coming from?"
Carbon, made, only wants to be unmade.
No wire, but there is something wrong with the image: namely, poor photoshop artists. My current monitor has excellent contrast near the color black (while my home monitor has excelent contrast near white), and it's caused me numerous problems in photoediting contests.
Increase the image contrast near black (or use a monitor that shows it well), and you'll notice some obvious brush strokes in space. Now, one can let the conspiracy theories fly as to why they're there.... realisticly, they were erasing artifacts of the merger to form the mosaic.
Really, people: Play around with your brightness/contrast before you submit an image to make sure!!!
Carbon, made, only wants to be unmade.
The theory that Iapetus was darkened by dust from Phoebe is alluring, but doesn't really hold up to scrutiny. It looks logical when you see a drawing of the Saturn system, with the half-dark moon sitting next to the dark moon, but that's about where the plausibility ends.
First, the moons are far, far apart. Phoebe orbits 5x farther from Saturn as Iapetus does - a difference on the order of 10 million km. Phoebe would have to be emitting a tremendous amount of dust for Iapetus to pick up any remotely visible amount of it.
Second, their orbits are inclined approximately 160 degrees apart. Iapetus orbits almost in Saturn's equatorial plane; Phoebe is nowhere near it. There's no astrophysical reason for the dust to get into Saturn's equatorial plane and stay there waiting for Iapetus. (Saturn's rings remain compressed into the equatorial plane by tidal forces near the planet, but those forces become extremely weak that far out. Iapetus orbits 30x farther from Saturn than the outermost large ring, and tidal forces decrease with at least the square of distance.) The volume of space that would have to be dusted by Phoebe to visibly darken Iapetus is simply prohibitively large.
Third, if Iapetus is darkened by dust, why not any of Saturn's other moons? OK, we don't yet know if Titan is, but the other moons should show some evidence of the same process, and they don't.
Fourth, Iapetus isn't half-and-half black and white like a chessboard or that race in Star Trek. Voyager showed that the dark area is a roughly circular area, roughly centered on the leading orbital hemisphere, with a highly irregular border. And there are light spots within the dark area - not a single dot in the center, but a few separated irregular areas. It's a surface feature of the moon with lower albedo, not "this half is black."
The dark area occupies a proportion of Iapetus's sphere similar to the proportion of the Pacific Ocean compared to Earth's sphere. Discounting the Velikovskyists, we're fairly sure that the Pacific Ocean was formed by Earthbound processes on our planet, so Iapetus's geological history could well have had something of similar scale.
I doubt we'll ever know for sure until an Iapetus lander spacecraft, which isn't even remotely in NASA's future plans yet. Yes, something weird happened on Iapetus, but it wasn't dust from little Phoebe.
Is it just me, or do many of those random features look more like gas vents or subsidences than they do impact craters?
Some of the smaller craters look almost as if they've got ant-lions hiding under them.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing