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Cassini's Iapetus Flyby
cupofjoe writes "The Jet Propulsion Laboratory is reporting on the Cassini spacecraft's recent close flyby of the Saturnian moon Iapetus, highlighting images taken from distances 100 times closer than the Voyager 2 flyby in 1981. Near real-time images were shown to Cassini mission team members in a presentation at JPL yesterday, during which a pre-recorded message from Arthur C. Clarke was played to the audience. Clarke wished them luck on the flyby, reminding all present that he had included a pretty accurate description of Iapetus in the original 1968 text of "2001: A Space Odyssey", years before Voyager made its flyby."
But I'd love to hear the impetus to check out Iapetus after taking that turn at Saturn. The tan tie of Titan and...
Oh fuck off. I haven't slept in days.
The spacecraft went into safe mode for the first time in four years directly after the Iapetus survey. NASA blames in on a cosmic ray. I think aliens have just captured the spacecraft and deleted/faked the important data.
"Iapetus was approaching so slowly that it scarcely seemed to move, and it was impossible to tell the exact moment when it made the subtle change from an astronomical body to a landscape, only fifty miles below. The faithful verniers gave their last spurts of thrust, then closed down forever. The ship was in its final orbit, completing a revolution every three hours at a mere eight hundred miles an hour - all the speed that was required in this feeble gravitation field."
After more than 40 years, I cannot remember why I placed the Saturn monolith on Iapetus. The submitter makes it sound like a boast but in reality it's simply saying that enthusiasts will appreciate the reference.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
i'm at a loss to explain those inky black patches.
wonderful photos.
Cassini shutdown into safe mode... hmm didn't know it ran windows.
Here you can see part of the ridge that goes around Iapetus: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/raw/raw-images-details.cfm?feiImageID=126186 and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/raw/raw-images-details.cfm?feiImageID=126346
Money for nothing, pix for free
If you look closely at what they describe as "Inky Stains" on Iapetus, they look more like burst bubbles. If you consider a consistent direction for the sun's light, and look at the pictures that overlap with different shades of shadow, it looks like the surface of the satellite was covered by air pockets and they happened to either cave in or break. The edges seem slightly too jagged and defined for them to be "stains." Compare "Inky stains on a frozen moon" to "Iapetus Flyby Raw Preview #13" and you can see what I'm talking about. I don't think those are discolorations, they look like caverns.
Go to the "raw images" pages and look at pages 10-11, they've got some awesome "death star" pics. And images 305-320 have some "inky stains" that might make good desktops...
Here's hoping it didn't blink!
"...Sleep comes like a drug in God's country Sad eyes, crooked crosses in God's country..."
It had no shooting, no love interest, no special effects, and hardly any dialogue. Not even one explosion! I couldn't understand what was going on half the time.
What can you expect of a movie made in the UK? Give me Hollywood every time. They really know how to shoot a Sci-Fi epic. Look at Star Wars!
The Evil Face on Iapetus ! (May have to squint a little to see it.) Must be angry at being disturbed.
(And, if there are any Cydonia freaks out there, no, I don't think it's a real face. It just jumped out at me when I saw this.)
Thats no moon... oh wait, yes it is. My bad.
Dark patches over a white surface? If you ask me, it looks like the other way around -- take a look:
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/raw/casJPGFullS33/N00092126.jpg
Doesn't it look like the white is covering the black and slowly un-covering it due to craters forming?
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
Even if it was a boast, Arthur C Clarke is allowed that little bit of ego. Besides being an engaging write, he was truly a SCIENCE fiction writer. I don't need to tell you all he's predicted, accomplished, and contributed to popular culture; you can do that yourself (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Clark).
Truly an icon, and I glad he was around to see some sort of space exploration take place, even if we didn't accomplish everything he predicted.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Doesn't anyone find it funny that Cassini was *allegedly* hit by a cosmic ray event that tripped it into safe mode JUST as it was sliding around Iapetus?
/tinfoil hat
The last time this happened was 4 years ago.
Coincidence? Ask Beagle!
-Styopa
I tried making an animated GIF of the equatorial ridge flyover photos just to get a sense of Cassini's motion as it flew by Iapetus. A bit jumpy, but wow.
As am I. We can image Iapetus down to 36' of resolution and still not understand what we are seeing! The image with the sparse dark patches is the most amazing. If you look you can see clear embayment relationships. The black stuff seems to fill low lying areas like a liquid. It reminds me a little of the lake bed terrain near the Huygens lander on Titan and also the radar images of the lake terrain. There are even islands of light material poking up through the black in some craters in the 92001 image. But the light/black transition lines do not seem to match the topography perfectly like a liquid would in all areas. Incredibly, the craters in the lower center of the image seem to small black patches "emptying into" larger ones though narrow channels. Iapetus almost certainly never had a significant atmosphere. Perhaps there was a methane rich wet layer below the regolith that was exposed, seeped into low areas and darkened. The analogy is an aquifer on the Earth. Methifer may be the best term. To make the idea work a mechanism would have to be found to ablate light material on the leading hemisphere to expose the dark stuff. Recall the recent resultthat explains Iapetus' bizarre equatorial mountains. A heated, oblate Iapetus was rapidly quick frozen, creating membrane stresses that forced up the mountains at the equator. Perhaps the frozen layer was thin, and methane rich liquid persisted beneath it for long enough for the dark crater floors to form.
wipes out klingons
Ooooh nice idea, thanks. I sent the GIF over to them, and I'm working on a higher-res PSD now.
I read the original 1968 book way back when I was in grade school somewhere around 1977 or 78, long before I ever saw the movie, so I always thought that Japetus was the correct name. I also thought the booked rocked, and when I finally did see the movie much later when I was in high school, I thought the movie was so confusing that it stunk, and thus have never cared much for the movie.
I recall reading this in a relatively recent edition of 2001- very cool stuff: (from wikipedia) - In Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), astronaut Dave Bowman finds an enigmatic alien monolith waiting for him on the surface of Iapetus. Iapetus' two tone coloration is caused by a vast white ellipse on the moon's surface, with the monolith appearing as a black dot in its exact center. When the Voyager space probes arrived at Iapetus thirteen years later, they discovered that there was indeed a black region within the moon's brighter hemisphere. Clarke reports that Carl Sagan, who was on the Voyager imaging team, sent him a photo, with the note "Thinking of you ...". Because of difficulties achieving a convincing model of Saturn's rings, the film version of 2001: A Space Odyssey relocated the monolith to an orbit around Jupiter.
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
Nice job on the GIF. I'm not usually one to toot my own horn, but this is also a perfect application of the thing I mention in my .sig. Basically, I use PHP to generate some repetitive javascript which, when combined with an image map, creates a neat effect. Source code and examples are here, and here is this technology applied to the Iapetus pics.
:-)
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Without any shame at all at I'm proud to announce the flyby video I compiled using Cassini's raw images. Shame on me:)