Iapetus

Titan, orbiting far beyond the rings, influences ring particles through gravity despite the hundreds of thousands of kilometres between them.

Closer moons like Mimas, Enceladus and Iapetus create more dramatic effects.

These moons pull on ring particles continuously as they orbit, generating patterns that repeat with mathematical precision.

When a moon completes one orbit and returns to the same relative position, the gravitational influence repeats.

The infrared observations show that the Phoebe ring surrounds Saturn in a nearly complete circle, though the density varies around the orbit.

The discovery of the ring in infrared data launched new questions about Saturn's system and prompted researchers to search for other faint or dark rings that might have been missed.

The connection between the Phoebe ring and Saturn's moon Iapetus reveals a remarkable relationship between a distant ring and a heavily marked moon.

Iapetus orbits within the Phoebe ring and displays an unusual appearance with a bright trailing hemisphere and a dark leading hemisphere.

Click the next one.

This is Iapetus, the other moon that looks like the Death Star.

This one has a ridge on the equator like the Death Star, except it's elevated.

It's not a trench.

Mars is 142 million miles from the sun.

The question is, how did that planet that it was orbiting explode into what is now the asteroid belt? OVUNITY, which is a technology which accesses energy from the vacuum to asymmetrical regaging, is virtually unlimited and the only known source of power strong enough to destroy an entire planet, to blow it up.

Next question is, was Iapetus artificial? Has there been enough meteoroid bombardment on that moon to make it virtually unrecognizable? You can click onto the next one.

Computer sessions of the message from the orb.

Titan, the second largest moon in the solar system, at 5,150 kilometers in diameter, orbits per grade.

So do Rhea, Dione, Tethys, Iapetus, Enceladus and Mimas.

Saturn possesses one of the richest satellite systems in the solar system, with 146 known moons and every single one of its large and mid-sized members orbits forward.

Uranus pushes the rule to its extreme and still obeys it.

And then, because Saturn is, uh, is, has this huge retinue of moons around it, some of which orbit it at a very large distance, um, you can start to tour these moons even before, uh, you really start to see what these rings and that planet are about.

So at that point, I say, "Well, we're gonna fly by this moon, Iapetus," which is bizarre.

I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's this icy moon, so it's very white and reflective, but it's got this huge dark region on it, probably because of material spewed out by another moon, has landed on it and darkened it.

And it also has...

We don't know why that formed.

It, it may have been from an impact.

Uh, some asteroid smacked into that moon, blew a lot of material off, that then formed a ring around Iapetus and then eventually collapsed back down.

Uh, some people think that it might have formed when the moon itself formed.

As they had suspected, the sun-tap station was on one of the moons.

The moon was called Iapetus, the third largest of Saturn's family.

It was about eight hundred miles in diameter, and the next to the farthest satellite from Saturn.

Russ was disappointed that they hadn't picked Titan, the biggest moon of all.

Titan was over two thousand miles wide, and appeared to have an atmosphere of methane.

The view of Saturn was awesome, even from Iapetus's orbit two million miles away.

Burl knew it would be a sight unparalleled in the system.

The great broad rings, composed of innumerable tiny particles of metal, stone, and possibly ice, encircled it as if held there by an invisible hand.

And the reason for that is that there is a body in the solar system that is just dark on one side and light on the other.

It's, uh, Iapetus.

Yeah.

I think it's a satellite of Saturn.

So it's round, but as it turns around, it's dark and then it's light, even though it's round in shape.

So the question was, is that what all of these light curves were about, or could we prove that the, that the thing was elongated?

Here's Iapetus as-

Oh, yeah.