This false-color mosaic shows the entire hemisphere of Iapetus (1,468 kilometers, or 912 miles across) visible from Cassini on the outbound leg of its encounter with the two-toned moon in 2007.

https://i.redd.it/fw805rsjw4wf1.jpeg

Share.

3 Comments

  1. Don’t know how big that moon is, but that certainly appears to be an enormous impact crater.

  2. Is OP a bot which is simply reposting old content? As far as I can see, all the posts are old, no original content.

  3. Iapetus was long known for one side being much brighter on one side of its orbit around Saturn than the other, but not resolvable in telescopes of the time, a longstanding mystery in astronomy. It wasn’t until the Voyagers that we learned why, when we got a close up view. Arthur C. Clarke wrote the novelization of 2001: A Space Odyssey around 1968, Saturn was the target instead of Jupiter (as in the movie), specifically Iapetus (he called it Japetus, as in ‘jape’, a joke). He imagined the bright area to be a large oval, with the monolith at the center, much like a huge eye.