29-30 August 2007 Icy Satellites (rev 49), Last stop on the road to Iapetus Options

[Exploitcorporati...]

CICLOPS' Rev 49 Looking Ahead page is up. Highlights include a fourth monthy Voyager-class encounter with Tethys with 500m resolution over Odysseus (finally!)
Detailed mosaics of Rhea's prominent ray crater and points west are on tap for Old Scabby's second closeup. This should be a really cool periapsis passage to tide us over until the 10th of September.

[edstrick]

Hey.. let's not give poor Rhea a hard time. She can't help looking like the ultimate battered wife.

Actually, Rhea IS interesting, but in horrendously subtle ways. Even the Voyager 1 close pass mosaics showed subtle lineaments of crater edges and features that simply aren't due to lighting effects <lighting CAN cause spureous lineations to appear> Something's "interesting" about the way Rhea responds to battering. Something makes the whispy features visible on the trailing side, only partially revealed to be due to subtle dione/tethys like fracturing.

It's a shame Rhea, the largest of Saturn's iceballs, isn't something semi-spectacular like Aerial at Uranus, but that's the breaks!