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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."
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!
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.
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. --
I've got a bad feeling about this.
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 :-) .
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.