Starship Asterisk*

"a small bright patch where an impacting rock might have uncovered deep clean water ice."

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070919.html

Looks more like it only cratered the surface of a meters thick icy coating of "frost".

Personally I think it is white on black as this image clearly shows.


, , , or here, , http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA08375.jpg

It is clearly more interesting and informative than the one they chose to show us. Whether I am
correct, or NASA scientists are, is not the point as much as is open discussions of potential explanations
that have as much merit as any. Or, , , is this something that shouldn't be discussed in front of the public?

But if you invert the image, it starts to feel as though the white of the inverted image covers the black of the inverted image, which is opposite of how it looks in the original.

It might be a kind of human tendency to stick with what we are used to, which is snow covering dirt. It is very easy to be confused. In particular, note the ridge near the lower left corner of the image... that seems to indicate that the area in question is indented rather than raised. It's hard to tell though.


click for big.

And, lets not forget, frost/snow transferrence requires a medium (atmosphere) through which to transfer. (unless Iapetus orbits through Enceladus' geyser ring.)

Geckzilla,
A most interesting approach!
But not one that convinces me, that the black covers the white. In the picture you reversed, the dark terrain is heavily and sharply edged with craters. The white is featureless, implying that it is more recent and covers the dark. Of course, the lack of features may be an artefact of exposure.

But other pics on the same NASA page - http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/events/ ... /index.cfm - especially the one labelled "Coated craters" show to me the dark material coating a white landscape, having impacted on the sides of elevated terrain. The dark seems to be coming from the right, in this pic.

A new meaning to "The Dark Side"!!

John

More pics from the recent flyby at
http://ciclops.org//view_media.php?id=17290

This one shows a most puzzling picture.
As it appears on the web, the craters appear as mounds, but if you invert it, or 'flip both', they appear as craters. In either case, a material apperas to be coating elevations and even drifting behind them....but it could be either the dark or the white, depending on which view you take!

John

A little perserverance and you find this too. (Just by changing the ID# on John"s link) http://ciclops.org//view_media.php?id=17261 This really looks like mounds to me until I discovered it is on the bottom of the moon.

The thing I don't understand is why the edges seem so crisp. It's so weird.

Maybe we are looking at more than two layering events. Try to imagine black deposited on white and then white deposited on black.

Today this image caught my attention because I noticed the features in the photo craterchains put in this thread were also clearly visible in it. Now, surely someone else has already noticed this, but, assuming that it is dark on light, it seems to have been traveling in some direction when it landed on the surface. What got me is when I looked at some more is that it is traveling in conflicting directions.

So I started drawing arrows over some of the craters and guessing approximately what direction it was moving when it fell since it is often deposited only on one side of the crater. Then I put circles on the ones that seemed to have either no direction or such a small one that I couldn't tell for sure where it was going. It definitely seems related to the ridge rather than something that slammed or drifted into the moon. It just seems to emanate from that ridge.

Anyway, I'd be really surprised to find that no one else pointed this out already. May as well post it though.

Click for the big one.



Original image and article http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00001136/

interesting link geckzilla. It appears that three things are happening.
1) The craters in the northern hemisphere tend to gather the black in the north rim of the craters.
2) The craters in the southern hemisphere tend to gather the black in the south rim of the craters.
3) The craters near the equater tend to have a general dusting all over or sporadically over the entire base of the craters.

What ever happened or is happening seems to be spreading from the equatorial regions towards the polar regions.

Excellent, geckzilla!

To add to your observations, without being able to construct such useful annotated pictures, there are some further markings, top left on the photo, that look exactly as if someone had spattered the globe with streaks of paint from a brush, or spatula. Not that they have, but this is another group of markings.

Seperate marking events? With your two groups of markings, in opposite directions, plus this streaking, makes three epochs.

Merely a further observation, without an explanation.

John

PS If I may be allowed my obsession as craterchains is allowed his (hers?), what sort of interplanetary war involves paint fights?

geckzilla wrote:Today this image caught my attention because I noticed the features in the photo craterchains put in this thread were also clearly visible in it. Now, surely someone else has already noticed this, but, assuming that it is dark on light, it seems to have been traveling in some direction when it landed on the surface. What got me is when I looked at some more is that it is traveling in conflicting directions.

So I started drawing arrows over some of the craters and guessing approximately what direction it was moving when it fell since it is often deposited only on one side of the crater. Then I put circles on the ones that seemed to have either no direction or such a small one that I couldn't tell for sure where it was going. It definitely seems related to the ridge rather than something that slammed or drifted into the moon. It just seems to emanate from that ridge.

Is it just me...?

Andy Wade wrote:Is it just me...?

Nope, Richard C. Hoagland has (so far) six pages of 'theories'.

Giant space buckyball?

*coughs*

, , , someone lost all their internal gasses to space. It then froze and coated the surface.

Norval,
A 56 year old MAN, read my frickin' bio JohnD. Your ploy is very amaturish, , , ,

Your bio states that you are 55. craterchains, do aliens periodically abduct some of your punctuation keys and then return them to you mid-sentence at times? Seems as though this would be a likely explanation for your use of commas in the beginning and ending of sentences rather than the usual punctuation.

JohnD wrote:...........

John

PS If I may be allowed my obsession as craterchains is allowed his (hers?), what sort of interplanetary war involves paint fights?

Haven't you ever played Paint Ball????

A Thousand Curses!
You have penetrated my disguise.
Cower, Earthlings, before the might of my Intergalactic Paint Gun.

Jong the Magnificent


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You forgot the lens flare, John. Everything in space has a lens flare before it explodes in a fiery inferno.

now with all those last post i'm wondering if we have enter the twilight spam zone?

The ESA site has just posted a long piece on the lastest images and opinion from the Cassini project. That is that the surface is black-on-white and not the other, and that the black, heat absorbtive surface is driving a process of 'thermal segregation' to exagerrate the contrast.


See: http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huy ... D7F_0.html

John

Interesting. The article mentions both the dark substance and the ridge but does not suggest any relation between the two. I'm a little disappointed.

I know what you mean.


Not so much as a cause but in the effect of dark dust distribution.

All the dark material is covering areas that point to a traveling direction away from the equitorial ridge.
All dark material that is covering crater walls that lie north of the equatorial ridge tend to be covering the north walls of the craters, and all dark material south of the equatorial ridge is covering the south walls of the craters. While material covering equitorial craters tends to be more evenly distributed at the bottom of those craters.

It's odd that they don't mention that, even to decide to dismiss it as coincidence.