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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."
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
One side of Iapetus is dark, the other as bright as snow. As Iapetus moves in its orbit around Saturn, the dark side faces forward, and many scientists think that the moon swept up the dark material, which might originally have come from another moon. There are some more great shots on another Planetary Society blog entry, and of course on the Cassini raw images feed from NASA.
Saddle up: Riding with Robots
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...
He's not just a fiction writer. I guess it's easy to forget that the man invented the communications satellite.