IAPETUS, MOON WITH A VIEW

IAPETUS, MOON WITH A VIEW
by H.M. Johnquest

Of the photos back from Saturn, a revealing shot of Iapetus, that two-faced rogue satellite, tugs at  me remotely. Its globular cover has a subtle repeating geometry indicating a sub-frame structure, it's 900 miles in diameter. Rough and glazed, black and white, it's yin and it's yang. This moonscape is half dark organic matter and half  (H2O) water-ice. Hemispheres appear to be enjoined by a protruding five-mile-high, twelve-mile-wide equator, a twin-ridge that shoots straight across the patchy irregular black and white surface.

Let's simplify the picture. Iapetus resembles a blackened, pockmarked, walnut shell wearing an ice jacket that's half taken off. In the sun's light, it's black and white. The ice from afar is white but zoom in close and it's gleaming dirty black ice. Iapetus has large and small craters.  Looking into their shadows, some are iced-over, some are filled with coal-black organic matter with a greenish cast according to spectrophotometry studies. There's nothing in the known universe that's simila., not even remotely close.

Curiously, most of Iapetus' craters have sprouted center peaks. [Perhaps there was a plasma semi-liquid layer under the surface so that when attacked by an asteroid projectile, Iapetus reacted with a liquidic splash that sealed on the spot, leaving a single mountain peak frozen in place.] Three distinct ages-old epochs are derived by noting the three distinct directions in which craters have been formed.

Around the pastel-hued Saturn-world and well outside its rings, Iapetus circles once  every 80 days. It hurtles through space but doesn't spin. It leads with its dark and damaged face while its ice-encased tail trails. Iapetus artificially was placed  into orbit; it's in apogee; it orbits in opposition to Saturn's spin. What a show. And it's on a tilted track -- 15 degrees inclined to the rings. Half the time Iapetus has a view of the lighter side of Saturn and its rings and half the time it looks upon Saturn's shadow-side where sunlight sifts through the rings. But Iapetus itself stays in the light of the sun, hardly ever eclipsed. Still, it's very very cold on the surface.  It's theorized there is a layer of ammonia ice under the water ice.

There are tons of theories about Iapetus.  One of the more likely theories of just how Iapetus received it's two-tone paint was posed by a Youngstown State University astronomy and physics professor (now emeritus), Warren Young.  Years before the Casinni space probe transmitted data from Saturn, Professor Young and a colleague proposed this: one hundred million years ago, Iapetus was struck by a passing comet which ripped half its face off. [Perhaps a larger comet passing by sucked away the layer of ice as it dragged Iapetus into Saturn's stronger gravitational field where it now resides. But  where did it come from anyway?] How about  some more of the natural facts on Iapetus? It's not easy to get to the truth so deep, so close, and yet so far far away.

Better info on Iapetus comes from private sector sites, obscure sources, from various non-commercial publications. One's critical thinking needs be exercised. NASA, for their current freaking-control-freaking reasons, holds too tightly onto interesting new data and perspecuitous revelations obtained from the September 2007, Cassini-Iapetus fly-by. Those are my photos, my data; I need to know and I have a right (miniscule tax-payer that I am). Most of the better pictures still come from the 2004 Casinni-Iapetus fly-by, although just last month Casinni was 100 times closer!  That close range radar imaging will be the most telling data to come forth. NASA has withheld those radar images from 2004 and from 2007. Why? Because they might-could show this world what's on and below the surface, inside of Iapetus. For now, the best radar data comes from privately funded ground based observatories [go figure].  One can  learn a lot by perusing scientists' blogs, little from the NASA public press releases.

I would like to see deeper views and further analysis of our own moon so marvelously circling planet Earth. Why does this moon of ours seem to be off limits? What's up with that? How much farther out there into our just reachable outer limits is Iapetus? Is Iapetus also destined, deemed by NASA to be just another forlorn and lonely satellite? For now...

My theory is that Iapetus, even if it is older than dirt, is an affordable fixer-upper. An abandoned death-star. Mightn't it be turned into a great space hotel and research facility for R&R and R&D? A life-star. Bids for occupancy could commence August, 2020.  Free enterprise will be out of this world.  We may see a private sector space-race land-rush onto Iapetus. Stake your claim. Make of it what you will, Iapetus may very well be what's left of an intelligently constructed aeons-ancient ruins that is just now being revealed from under a battered sheet of ice -- it's a mother lode of a time capsule.

Some say that NASA wants you to think that you, yeah you, are the most highly advanced and most intelligent life form in the entire universe, ever.

Here's looking way up at you, kid.

c.2007, H.M.J.