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Scientific Thoughts

The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility - Albert Einstein

Monday, July 18, 2005

The wonders of space are a plenty. We have only just begun to scratch the surface:). The unmanned missions of NASA are leading the way in our understanding of the planets and moons in our Solar System, and foremost today in this pack is the Cassini spacecraft.
Cassini recently passed within a mere 170 kilometers (110 miles) of Saturn's moon Enceladus. The daring flyby was the closest encounter ever by any spacecraft with any body in the outer solar system (excepting, of course, Huygens' landing on Titan).

Boulders on Enceladus (Courtesy: Planetary)
Cassini's viewpoint on Enceladus for this flyby -- its third chance to view the icy moon up close -- yielded the first-ever views of Enceladus' south polar regions. These regions are intriguing because earlier, more distant views showed a striking terrain.
Among the images is a unique one captured near closest approach, at a range of only a few hundred kilometers. At this range, the sharp-edged ridges of Enceladus' terrain break up into distinct tumbled boulders, a completely new view of the surface of Enceladus. It will undoubtedly take scientists some time to unravel the puzzle of what this morphology means for the geology of the little icy moon:):).

Enceladus Boulders

7/18/2005   1 comments Post a Comment

1 Comments:

At July 21, 2005 7:22 PM, Blogger Sray said...
The phrase "outer solar system" refers to the region beyond the orbit of Mars. This region contains all the gas-giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) and their moons, the asteroid belt, Pluto and Charon, and the Kuiper belt, along with countless comets and meteors.

So "any body" in the outer solar system refers to any body in that region :).
 

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