The Art Neuro Weblog

What's On Iapetus
Here's first up on Pleaides' big list.
This is freaky. Sort of out there with Kubrik's 2001. The salient bit that kicks off the weirdness is here:

As Cassini watched, Iapetus would be visible during its so-called “western elongation” (when it was west of Saturn in the sky), but would then progressively get dimmer as it curved around and passed behind the planet, until it completely vanished as it approached “eastern elongation.” Then, a few days later, it would “magically” reappear … as an extremely faint “star” … growing steadily in brightness, until it reached its farthest distance west of Saturn once again and its greatest brightness!

This puzzling behavior would then mysteriously repeat -- like the newly invented mechanical clockwork -- every 79 days; a mysterious “winking” moon … orbiting Saturn … for as long as Cassini observed.

Although he was only capable of observing Iapetus in his small telescope as a “dimensionless point of light,” Cassini correctly theorized that this “winking moon” phenomenon had to be due to the fact that one entire hemisphere of Iapetus must be vastly brighter than the other half – and that the moon was synchronously rotating (with one hemisphere continuously facing Saturn – like Earth’s Moon always faces Earth) as Iapetus revolved around the distant ringed planet in its 79-day orbit (below). If the leading hemisphere of Iapetus was “very dark” Cassini theorized, and the trailing hemisphere “remarkably bright,” this simple geometry would result in the distant moon periodically falling below detectability in his “modest glass
…”

Did you get that?
Then, it goes on into this thing:

Three hundred ten years later – on November 14, 1980 -- the NASA Voyager 1 unmanned spacecraft transmitted, from only a few hundred thousand miles away, the first clear image back to Earth showing that Cassini had been right! Remarkably, the entire “front half” of Iapetus was fully ten times darker than the “back half” – the former reflecting only about as much light as a piece of charcoal … or (as Arthur put it in “2001”) burnt toast!

The geometry of this inexplicable dichotomy also proved unique (below): for obvious reasons, Iapetus forever earned the title that evening, after Voyager’s historic first fully resolved images were sent home, of — “The Yin/Yang Moon”

Okay. So far, so good. Cutting to the chase, they are saying this:

Passing as close at 40,000 miles, and with cameras orders of magnitude superior to Voyagers’, the results of the December 31, 2004 Cassini imaging did not disappoint: not only do the details surpass all prior expectations … they reveal even deeper mysteries surrounding this increasingly exotic moon ….

The distant images immediately confirmed one curious impression left from the Voyager encounters of a quarter century before: in addition to its other unique characteristics, Iapetus does not seem to be a perfectly round moon!

A comparison with a real sphere (below-right) reveals that, from this angle, Iapetus is visibly “squashed” -- by something like 50 miles out of its 900, or about 5%. For solid rocky bodies larger than a few hundred miles across, the relentless force of gravity always overcomes the innate tensile strength of such materials, and forces them to assume a spherical geometry. For solid icy bodies (those possessing less tensile strength), the limiting size before a sphere is formed is even smaller

The long and short of it is that there seems to be a 'Great Wall' of Iapetus for which there is little explanation.

In our opinion, Cassini’s discovery of “the Great Wall of Iapetus” now forces serious reconsideration of a range of staggering possibilities … that some will most certainly find … upsetting:

That, it could really be a “wall” … a vast, planet spanning, artificial construct!!

Freaked out yet? Well baby, welcome to the Space Freaks' blog. :)
The Cassini Mission was da bomb.
We recommend you read on the whole entire 5 page article. I don't necessarily buy the 'Design' argument, but those photos demand further research. You know, research until proven to be entirely guff. As Jules Winfield yells at Vincent Vega, "Don't ignore this shit man! Don't sweep it under the carpet..."

- Art Neuro