Ridge on Iapetus
The Cassini orbiter acquired a strip of color and stereo images along the equator of Saturn's icy moon Iapetus in September 2007, near the boundary between the dark and bright hemispheres. This view shows an area of the equator on the trailing hemisphere crossed by low ridges and fault scarps. The prominent equatorial ridge seen elsewhere is mostly missing in this scene and replaced by low ridges and fault scarps trending north-south. This perspective view looks south across the equator and is based on stereo topography derived from Cassini orbiter imaging data. Patches of bright pure water ice can be seen flanking some of the darker cratered slopes. The scene is ~100 kilometers across and is excerpted from a new movie showing a hypothetical flight over Iapetus. Mosaic base is at a resolution of 55 meters per pixel. Image processing, stereo topography, and visualization were performed by Dr. Paul Schenk, Lunar and Planetary Institute, Houston.
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Updated: 20 months ago
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houston, Texas,
United States