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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.
yeah, though if it ran Linux, it would freeze trying to get into safe mode, and then tell you on the screen that you don't have a graphics card.
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
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...
Probably because we should attempt no landings there.
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
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.