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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.
"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.
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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.
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.
The bad news: all the pictures came back at 640x480 resolution with 4-bit color depth, and had the words "Safe Mode" superimposed over each of the four corners.