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Cassini Shows Close Up of Iapetus
dazza101 writes "The Cassini spacecraft passed within 72,000 kms of the Saturn moon Iapetus yesterday, taking a series of spectacular images of this intriguing moons rugged surface. An excellent prelude to what promises to be one of the major stories of the new year, the plunge of the Huygens probe into Titan's atmosphere on January 24."
The article submitter is just trying to make sure nobody shows up so the tickets wont be sold out.
Or, more precisely, the geometric object that crated on mars:
The mars golf ball.
At a guess, it's a glob of molten rock that condensed into a sphere in orbit before hitting the surface again. But that still doesn't make me want to see more detailed photographs and information about it so very, very badly. It would probably be one of the most impressive sights on the Martian surface.
In 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clarke described Iapetus as having a black circle painted on it, with a white circle within.
When one of the Voyager probes photographed Iapetus, a "circular" black area was found with a smaller white area within.
Why is this interesting? 2001 was published in 1968. The Voyager probes didn't visit Jupiter until 1980 (V1) and 1981 (V2).
That's right. All your base.
The first look at a moon with its own atmosphere that may resemble the atmosphere of the early Earth?
I've noticed in a lot of the images, there appears to be a ring of mountains around most of Iapetus's equator: Here, here and here.
I'm no scientest, but is it possible that this moon once had a ring system like Saturn itself? Over time the ring particles fell out of orbit and formed the mountains along the equator.
Another feature I'm quite curious about is this globe-spanning ridge. I haven't seen any mention of it anywhere yet.
It seems (though I may be wrong) to sit dead-center on the darkened portion of the moon and span much of the length of the dark part as well. Is there a connection perhaps? I'd be interested in the opinions of any planetary astronomers.