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."

Comments

If that's no space station, what is it?

[IO ERROR]

Iapetus doesn't concern me. What concerns me is Mimas, which has a clearly visible crater with a mountain inside it.

I have a hard time believing that's a natural formation. And I'm concerned that whatever did it might still be bouncing around the universe somewhere.

Anyone have any idea what could have caused a formation like that?

Re:If that's no space station, what is it?

[Pinkfud]

That's a "rebound effect". Whatever caused that crater was so big and hit so hard that it penetrated the moon's crust. The more plastic inner material was violently compressed, then shot out through the center of the crater forming the "mountain". It's a rare phenomenon, but I don't have any trouble believing it's natural.

Re:If that's no space station, what is it?

[Turing Machine]

You can see a similar phenomenon in these high speed photos of water droplets.

Re:If that's no space station, what is it?

[The Journalist]

Cheney should be very worried now. NASA's found his prototype Death Star.

There are....

[deglr6328]

....also many more images if you go straight to the raw feed.

Re:There are....

[deglr6328]

I think you were replying to the AC next to me but I'll reply anyway! :o) It's not a UFO and it's not a star and it's not a comet or planet. Its a proton, or perhaps, an electron. Accelerated to relativistic velocities by the soalr wind or saturn's magnetosphere (or both) it struck the cameras CCD at an angle and as it traveleld through, excited some electrons in the valence band of the semiconducting image detection layer to the conduction band, just like a photon of visible light would if it hit the detector and produced a streak in the image. It's called a "cosmic ray hit" and there is software to remove them from the images.

Not fair, not square.

[Pig Hogger]

Something's missing, like big, square, black thin block.

(No, you won't get it if you didn't read the book).

Bah...

[el-spectre]

Call me when they find a monolith...

Wrong date.

[daquake]

The Huygens plunge is January 14'th, not the 24'th :) 2 Weeks is hard enough to wait for! :)

Re:WRONG DATE !!! Huygens descends on the 14th.

[eclectro]

Actually submitter is right.

The probe does descend into the atmosphere on Jan 14th, but it takes an additional 10 days to photoshop the results.

Re:All these missions seem to end...

[snake_dad]

At the risk of trollbating... Missions like Pioneer 10/11 and Voyager 1/2 were fly-by missions. They were accelerated to tremendous speeds by one or several gravity assists, and thus merrily went their way out of the solar system. More recent missions are designed to enter orbit around the targeted planet, and to achieve orbit they have to slow down a lot. It would cost a huge amount of fuel to get them going again fast enough to exit the solar system, and all that fuel would have a big impact on how much instruments could be carried along.

Some missions (like Galileo) were indeed crashed onto the target planet to prevent them becoming a problem later, or to use the impact as a science data point. Other missions were crashed quite unintentionally.