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Cassini Returns Photos of Hyperion
imipak writes "The Cassini Saturn probe has captured the previously unseen northern polar region of Saturn's moon Hyperion. Its weirdly eroded surface looks like nothing else in the solar system seen so far, demonstrating once again that when it comes to planetary exploration, "expect the unexpected" is more than just glib advice from the Hitch-hiker's Guide!"
And it's a good thing!
Cassini was helped to more funding because WE the geeks of Web/Net WANT TO KNOW. We want to see our world, our Universe. We join advocacy groups and science foundations.
Keep up the good work NASA. Let private groups continue as well.
I see a 2nd space renaissance soon!
If you "get" pointers add me as a friend (116)!
...it's a weirdly eroded space station.
My girlfriend has one of those in the shower, and yells at me when I leave it in the old water :(
Brent Jones
The image in the post http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/moons /images/PIA07737-br500.jpg is of the moon Tethys and not Hyperion.
It was a double flyby, hence the confusion.
Imagine a beowolf cluster of "Thats no moon" jokes...
The two pictures are from different moons, Tethys (second link), Hyperion (first link). Perhaps reading a caption from the real article at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm would help
Having no formal education in planetology does not stop me to spout nonsense on slashdot:
:)
But the first picture looks like there was just big collision (old big crater) followed by lots of small collisions, without any erosion in between. I *think* I have seen similar features on the moon.
To have this picture is nonetheless an astonishing accomplishment.
I think that simply the lighting makes this view impressive
Everyone knows NASA faked the moon landings, and this is just a black and white close up of a rice crispy in Mike Griffin's morning cereal! ;-)
She's built like a steak house, but she handles like a bistro....
I assume it's intended to more generally portray what everything else looks like, that aged and eroded. Contours and features across the solar system generally tend to be smoothed over by erosion or the settling of debris from subsequent meteor impacts. In contrast, Hyperion show's quite a few sharply defined ridges. By the way, I think the second image is taken in infrared, and the color choices for displaying it are even more confusing.
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/moons /images/PIA07737-br500.jpg
Iv'e scene this in the toliet bowl after a hard night of drinking and Taco Bell.
One thing that I have never seen in discussions of cratering, is elastic collisions. Everybody seems to assume that collisions are necessarily plastic: A smaller body smashes into a larger body and the smaller body is pulverised in the process.
However, in the asteroid belt especially, many collisions may be elastic, with bodies bouncing off each other like billiard balls, leaving behind large indentations. This could happen, as these bodies are moving in essentially the same direction and therefore collisions may not always have much force.
Oh well, what the hell...
If it's a microscopic picture, I have to ask - what browser are you using to view it?
Bad jokes aside, this is what a magnified grain of salt looks like:
(it's pretty enough to make desktop wallpaper)
What's that thing in the top left hand corner of the second image? It doesn't fit with the rest of the landscape...
You mean the words that say, "DB_Session allocated the following problem: DB Error: connect failed"? Something tells me it is an earthy artifact.
Table-ized A.I.
Uhmm, the cheese looks definitely older than on our moon (set zoom to highest level).
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
Wow, that is kind of eerie.
The JPL page says the straight line is probably a fault or other geological feature, but the absence of any others in that area is a little suspicious.
I blew up that section a bit, and it looks a LOT like something diamond- or arrowhead-shaped came screeching along the surface and plowed into the side of a hill, kicking up surface material and burying the leading edge. The "buried" object itself seems to be very sharply defined with straight lines, as opposed to the more "natural" landscape around it.
An alien space probe would be neat, but I'm guessing it's a chunk of rock that impacted the moon at a weird angle. I'm sure Hoagland and his friends will have a field day with it, despite the crappy JPEG compression leading to terrible artifacts when it's blown up.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
I think there are two factors at work:
- In space, the lack of atmosphere gives things an "unreal" look in photographs. See if you can dig up the movie that was done by Messenger as it left Earth. It actually looks less "believable" than a modern Hollywood movie in some ways.
- The images are false colour. This is useful for conveying more information, but it does make them look a little "wrong."
For comparison, here's another version of the Tethys shot. It looks a lot less surreal, because it's greyscale.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Its a fish fossil. You see, when God created the earth 3,000 years ago he had some stuff left over, so he just thew it in orbit around other planets, figuring no one would ever find it.
You don't get craters with elastic collisions as they are a sure sign of absorbed energy. I doubt anything solid ever came out again from craters like these.
On se Internetz nobody noes your German.
The greyscale clear filter image I mentioned in another post is better for this work, and has less compression artifacts.
The line really looks like a depression in that one, whereas in the false colour image it could be a protrusion.
I blew it up considerably in Photoshop and increased the contrast to see details better. There are a number of smaller craters directly in the path of the line. If it were a rock impact, to my (non-astrophysicist/geologist) eye it looks like it behaved like a skipping stone - There are some bigger craters near where the top of the image cuts off the line, and about halfway along there's a pair on opposite sides of what appears to be a hill, as if it were skating along, used the hill as a jump, landed, and continued its movement.
The bigger feature at the end of the line seems more symmetrical in this version. It looks kind of like a Concorde... or a giant bird footprint. Watch out Tethys, Colonel Sanders is too far away to save you.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Try this image.
Suddenly, it looks absolutely not "artificial" and a whole lot like a fault line. You can even see a bunch of other smaller/thinner lines in the image. The "buried" object looks irregular, with absolutely no sharp definition or straight lines at all. Looks like just an oddly eroded area.
Actually there are a ton of reasons for such a surface.
1) Its by Saturn which has a massive gravitational pull. This causes Saturn to pull in a lot of comets, asteroids, and dust. Thus Saturn gets hit with a lot more debris then the planets in the inner solar system. This would also increase the risk of the moons getting hit with this debris as well and therefore will have more impacts then that of the planets and moons in which we know.
2) Saturn has rings filled with debris. So if the moon ever happened to swing into these rings it would go through hundreds if not thousands of impacts. That could have very well created the surface that you see. This could have happened at any time in the moons history and so is a very likely cause.
3) The moon could have some sort geological processes that are responsible for such a surface, however thats very unlikely.
Personally I would put my bet on number 2 cause it makes the most sense. If the moon went through on of Saturns rings especially when the rings might have just formed there would have been a lot of collisions leaving the surface scarred like you see in the picture.
You can see the raised part in the centre, around which is part of the old crater wall.
Note the crater wall is significantly brighter than the surrounds - this is exposed materials, mainly water ice to judge from the brightness.
The other thing to note is that the crater is incomplete, and is itself riddled with craters, both the centre and the crater walls. This tells us that the large crater is very old. How old I would leave to an expert of the Saturnian system, who would no more about impact frequencies than me.
Hyperion is interesting in that it is the largest irregular body in the solar system. Anything larger (and many smaller objects) are pulled into a spherical shape by their own gravity. Hyperion is not that much smaller than Enceladus, and is of a similar make-up (frozen H2O) yet these object are very different.
I would hypothesise that a large impact has sheared off part of Hyperion- that's why the large crater is incomplete - the rest is gone, possibly to become part of the ring material but I don't know what the timing of that blast was.
The very strange not-really-craters next to the very large impact crater I would say were outgassing artefacts, not any type of impact crater. Basically the heat from the large impact caused volatiles to rocket out of Hyperion, leaving those sort of "exit valve" formations.