Tuesday, December 28, 2004
Ice Pirates bothering you? Send them here.
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image-details.cfm?imageID=1242
I complained earlier about the ignorance of Hollywood science fiction writers. The whole driving premise of Star Trek: Voyager's pilot episode was that the bad guys wanted to steal water from the good guys. This led the captain to blow up their only way home, thus giving the premise for the series.
Even before the scrutiny given the moons of Jupiter and Saturn by the Voyager probes in 1979-1981, we knew most of them were made mostly of ice. Even pre-space flight technology analyzing light and gravity gave us a clue from 800 million miles away. Since the 130-some planets we've discovered orbiting other stars are mostly Jupiter-sized, it's not a stretch to assume that planets of this size are fairly common in the universe. And where there are planets, there are probably moons.
Enceladus is an interesting place. Compared to its larger sisters in the neighborhood, it doesn't seem to have as many craters. A Voyager pic is here: http://www.marssociety.pl/enceladus-saturn-1.jpg. Some of the craters near the day-night boundary seem to be filled with mounds. Then there's that swatch of territory that looks like a glacier. Then what about those straight-line cracks? What is all this? I'm curious to find out.
