Friday, July 16, 2004
Iapetus, one of my favorite moons ...
... image here: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2004-182.
Fifty percent reflective on one side, four percent on the other. Why? I'm not convinced by the Phoebe drift theory. Phoebe is pretty far out; and what could possibly be the mechanism for Phoebe to lose dark material in such quantity as to appear on a whole hemisphere of its big brother? I suspect these medium sized moons will reveal big surprises in the years ahead.
Reminds me of the game SolarQuest. Anybody ever see it or play it? When I lived in Illinois 1988-91, my young friend Christopher and I staged epic battles after choir practice. For the uninitiated, the game is something of a Monopoly clone: players struggle for supremacy by purchasing planets and their satellites, building fuel stations, and trying to hammer the opponent into bankruptcy while avoiding getting stranded somewhere without fuel. One year, my friend and I played a 24-hour long game. One of us had the monopoly of Saturn's moons and the other Jupiter. The latter monopoly was more valuable, but landing on Titan, you could still take a pretty rough hit on your cash supply. Eventually, I wrested control of the Galilean satellites and Chris succumbed to big-time rents in the Saturn system.
Iapetus never figured much in those battles, though. John Varley, in his novel Titan (ca 1980), explained its dark hemisphere by a species of sentient life that "lays its egg" on a small moon to gather raw materials in its infancy. The adult form is about 2,000 miles across with a hollow interior filled with various creatures and adventures for the astronaut protagonists. X-rated, but a fairly decent read.
