Slashdot Mirror
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."
Joey, Monica, and Chandler
Queue the wackos....
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
In http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/media/ir/2004/197_2 07_1.jpg that photo, I think I see a wire. I declare these are fakes! Tin foil hats set to maximum strength! Full conspiracy ahead!
You brainwashed fools. That actually is George Washington. He's been hiding on Phoebe all this time, waiting for the state of affairs in the United States to hit rock-bottom before making his triumphant return and lifting American society to its pinnacle.
Judging from the clarity of the picture, it looks like he's making his final launch checks ;)
In C++, friends can touch each others private parts.
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!
I wonder how many "good names" these guys go through for each of these features. I wonder how long NASA spends discussing and debating them. I wonder how much of our tax payer dollars are effectively pissed away. Just have one guy name the damn features and get back to work.
Why not name the features after other characters played by Lisa Kudrow?
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.
There ought to be a rule that *somewhere* on every planet,moon, star etc. is called springfield.
Me: Hm - looks like they're about to take pictures of Phoebe. Should be pretty cool.
...
My Lovely Wife: Well, out of all the cast of "Friends" I thought she had the best career options.
Me:
(Really, she's only like this on astronomy.)
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
I'm sick of looking at black and white pictures of far-off places where the use of nuclear fusion not only makes sense but is also the only way to bring life to desolate locales.
I wanna go there. Where is my Eagle lander damnit?!! Where is my General Enterprises Hull? Where is my Millenium Falcon? Where is my Beaver-1?
Screw all this mechano-assembly 'space sciences', screw all this "lets invade Iraq so we can feed our fat society even more plastic landfill", screw all this "nuclear fusion will kill the Earth", I want my space-hardened nuke-powerplant packin' HumVee, and I want it NOW!!
Seriously. I'd move to Phoebe TODAY. But the closest I can get is a shitty winnebago on some beach in the Netherlands, or some crap like that. What's the frickin' holdup people?
Sheesh. New World Order my ass. Those guys have no clue what they're doing
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
She can also honestly state "I am the offspring of Uranus" which is guaranteed to get a titter among those Titans who are into Beavis and Butt-Head.
Looks more like concentric circles to me. Maybe we've found the true location of Atlantis.
I've got a bad feeling about this.
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.
How long do you have to stare at these things before you see something? I keep expecting a zombie/ghost face to sudden appear and make me wet my pants. ...again.
Not being a native English speaker, could someone clear this up for me? How do you pronounce Phoebe?
Since it's not named after the character from the TV Series "Friends", but after an old greek goddess, it is completely irrelevant how the america-centric Slashdot crowd pronounces it. I'm from Germany, we say "Föbe", with Umlaut, but only the Gods know what the old Greek said. Or maybe a classical philologist.
In any case, the english pronounciation "Fee-Bee" is most probably totally wrong.
One of the Greek islands is the island of Lesbos (where the poet Sappho first wrote about love between women, and yes this is where the term lesbian comes from). This would be seriously cool on several counts:
In other words everyone who loves space exploration wins :-) .
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.
Is this really the most important/interesting thing that Slashdot can tell us about the Phoebe mission so far? What next, a bulletin about a cloud that is shaped like a bunny rabbit?
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
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.
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).
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