Iapetus: A Moon With A View

Re this alien cooking guide, I'm disappointed. I read the entire article and several of the links. Nowhere does it tell me how to cook an alien! You are a fraud Blobrana!!

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You don't need to cook them... they can be eaten raw. The thing is, being most likely composed of different amino acids from us, their flesh might be completely useless to humans as a nutritional food.

 

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Anyone else find this post particularly ironic? I mean, I read the post with the main body at the top of my screen, and I immediately thought, "I wonder if btimsah has read this?" Then I scrolled up and found that Tim was the author of it, this left me somewhat gobsmacked!

Dammit, I just posted about Iapetus's anomalous status on another thread, only to find this one specifically dedicated to the subject! And everyone better informed than I thought I was!

 

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That ridge is a puzzle.
I wonder if it circles the whole planetoid, or if it's only on the darker half?
Actually, it doesn't appear to cross the whole dark side, but stops before reaching the basin on the right-hand side of this image. I could be mistaken - need more images!

 

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Cuzz Iapetus is a strange Moon.

 

Don't we all! I am serious about sending a probe to Iapetus. Or, okay even titan to get some HIGH QUALITY surface shots. So I can find alien ruins..

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Here are the raw images of Iapetus: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimed...es-list.cfm?browseLatest=0&cacheQ=0&storedQ=0

I'm assuming that link will last, which it may not. Then again maybe it will. Well, actually I have no idea if it will or not. I'm just confident that it will work long enough that some of you will get use out of it, untill it's bad. Of course, if only a few get access to the successfull link then it's completely unfair to those who did not. I am now considering removing the link completely.

Here's my solution! If the link dies go here and do you're own damn search!

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http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/raw/index.cfm

 

I think it is a sign that this moon has been split apart long ago, by an impact; then collapsed back onto itself. This sort of process has led to the interesting patterns on Miranda.
But Iapetus has long been known to be anomalous, because its high contrasted hemispheres can be detected from Earth; Arthur Clarke made Iapetus the target of the Discovery mission in the novelisation of 2001 for this reason.

Incidentally it would take a big mirror to collect enough energy to sustain a human habitat or colony at Iapetus' distance from the Sun;
but in free fall, mirrors can be arbitrarily large.
Actually, if I were to design a colony in Saturn space, I'd rely on electrical energy generated from Saturn's magnetic field for life support; the sunlight is weak at Saturn's distance, and the magnetic field is extensive.

 

Looking at that incredible equatorial ridge Iapetus has, it's tempting to imagine the whole satellite being squeezed in a vice, clamped on the poles - instead of deforming smoothly it cracked open at the equator, and plastic mantle ices oozed out. If Iapetus were scaled up to the size of Earth, that ridge would be well over 100 km in height!

A pole-to-pole compression of the satellite might be accomplished by... well, I honestly can't think of anything reasonable!

 

If the ridge was formed away from the equator, would the planet's spin change over time to bring the ridge on to equator (or the equator to the ridge)?

 

That's a good point - though I suppose the strong tidal bulges induced by Saturn must make changes in the rotational axis difficult.

The ridge could represent a really drastic form of plate tectonism, which froze up early in Iapetus' history.

 

I found an interestingly, blue/yellow area on Iapetus;

<a href="http://img71.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img71&image=pia06167topcenter2gk.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://img71.exs.cx/img71/9295/pia06167topcenter2gk.th.jpg" border="0" alt="Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us" /></a>

I was curious if this could be an image problem, but it's not really noticable anywhere else in the image. The original file is here;

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA06167

 

I'm almost certain the blue & yellow tints are an artefactof the imaging process, yes.

The original file you linked has a very nice picture - and that level of detail really shows how the dark stain over half of Iapetus must have been deposited externally (though I don't suppose its inconceivable that the bright material is actually the deposit and the natural crust is dark...)

Some have even suggested that the black stuff (cosmic tobacco char?) wafted inward from Phoebe, which is about 3 times further from Saturn than Iapetus...

 

Perhaps some liquid from Saturn escaped lol..

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Other than Aliens' spraying this material on Iapetus, what other possible explanation's can there be for the dark stain?

As for the color, I'll accept that it's an artifact. There are no other images in which the same can be seen or verified. Of course, that image is the only COLOR image of that area that I know of. Just wait for prettier images. I know I spelled that wrong, but who cares?

 

Spelt what wrong? The comparative form of the adjective pretty is indeed prettier, and modern English usage recognizes color as correct spelling along with colour.

From a pure emotional perspective, the bleakness and deadness of those remote worlds which Cassini is imaging seems even more profound when you think that they have almost no natural colours - except for Titan of course, and Saturn itself.