NASA's Cassini probe performed its closest pass to Saturn's odd little Iapetus moon on September 10th , and the first, unprocessed pictures have begun showing up online.There are many more stunning pictures online, click the article title or this link for more of the story and more pics!
Thanks to Shaun A. Saunders for the post
4 comments:
What produces the ridge around the equator???
I am so glad you noticed those! Ridges along the equator tell me one thing. The ridges are all in the same direction and almost all of them are along the equator. Looking at other moons in the jovian system you see that impacts and impacts between other moons are common. I will bet that exploration of this moon will find that the body is made up of two seperate but somewhat equal sized smaller bodies. The ridges indicate that the collision was fairly slow and most likely recently. Without knowing the axial tilt or the rotational period it is really hard to make an estimate of when, but long enough ago to have the moon regain a sphere shape (which I am told can happen fairly quickly) But not so long ago that tidal forces from the primary have not smoothed out the evidence.
Thems my guesses....
Paul
Interesting theory, and a chain of low probabilities (eg, size of contributing bodies, trajectories and speeds etc) , but then, the equatorial ridge IS there....I wonder what other ideas people might have?
Theory as to the creation of this moon....yes. Theory as to the creation using this method of moons in other systems? Well there are ample example of this happening in the past. As it sits now, Saturn has moons in or close to the same orbit apx. speed. I agree that most times the collisions are high energy. However the composite looks much different.
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