Speaking of Iapetus
Sep. 2nd, 2007 01:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinCassini's one truly close flyby of Iapetus is coming up on September 10th, with images probably available on the 11th. This should be spectacular; Iapetus is one of the most bizarre and still-mysterious objects in the solar system. This encounter will fill in the remaining blank space on its map (mostly in the bright hemisphere), and provide better pictures of its equatorial ridge, the bright mountains apparently associated with it that Voyager saw, and, if past experience with Iapetus is any indication, brand-new puzzles and mystifications as well.
Also: On the JPL raw image archive, images from the Titan, Rhea and Tethys flybys of the past few days are now up. Except for Titan, which Cassini encounters on almost every orbit and uses as a gravitational handle to alter its trajectory, the Rhea flyby is the first really close moon encounter in a long time, since Cassini's spent some time looping out of Saturn's equatorial plane while twisting its orbit around.
There are some really close pictures of rugged icy terrain on Rhea, and huge mosaics of crescent Rhea with Saturnshine and against the face of Saturn. I'm not going to have the time to mess with them, so you'll probably have to wait for either Emily Lakdawalla or the JPL folks to do it.
And: Here's a nice if not super-close picture of Helene from July. Helene is one of Saturn's tiny co-orbital moons, which orbit in the vicinity of Lagrange points 60 degrees ahead of or behind other, larger moons. Saturn is easily the most fun place in the solar system for students of classical mechanics.
Also: On the JPL raw image archive, images from the Titan, Rhea and Tethys flybys of the past few days are now up. Except for Titan, which Cassini encounters on almost every orbit and uses as a gravitational handle to alter its trajectory, the Rhea flyby is the first really close moon encounter in a long time, since Cassini's spent some time looping out of Saturn's equatorial plane while twisting its orbit around.
There are some really close pictures of rugged icy terrain on Rhea, and huge mosaics of crescent Rhea with Saturnshine and against the face of Saturn. I'm not going to have the time to mess with them, so you'll probably have to wait for either Emily Lakdawalla or the JPL folks to do it.
And: Here's a nice if not super-close picture of Helene from July. Helene is one of Saturn's tiny co-orbital moons, which orbit in the vicinity of Lagrange points 60 degrees ahead of or behind other, larger moons. Saturn is easily the most fun place in the solar system for students of classical mechanics.