[X] My Assistant

[ngunn]

Telecon announcement (via Jupiter List - thanks)
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/jupiter_list/message/8170

[imipak]

Terrestrial climatology's a banned topic here; I'm mentioning this term *solely* in the context of outer planets, icy moons and suchlike.

As I understand it, the proposed mechanism for the Iapetus dichotomy and perhaps for Pluto's changing regional albedo and colour sounds like it might be analagous to a (hypothesised) phenomena known as "the albedo flip feedback". I won't describe it here, except to say that the basic idea is of temperature-related albedo changes feeding back on themselves. The question, then, is: are these outer solar-system surface albedo variations examples of A.F.F., or is A.F.F. an example of an Iapetus / Pluto / (others?) process? (And who gets to decide, anyway? Call the IAU! )

Does anyone know of diagrams plotting the phase spaces of the sort of gunk we might expect to see on the surface of KBOs, TNOs and Pluto, as sun-centred concentric bands? (Mebbe there are too many different species of tholins, all with slightly different temp/phase characteristics, to make that practical?) I can visualise Pluto's eccentric orbit crossing many such bands as it approaches and recedes from the sun along it's orbit, causing assorted varieties of rains, snows, hails, steams, fogs, geysers and sublimation. Perhaps you'd end up with something like a... (FSM forgive me!) ... cryo-Io, plus Titan-like surface liquid features, *plus* the sort of wacky features the CO2 condensation / sublimation cycle produces at the Martian poles. (Swiss cheese terrain, the spiders, deep canyons in the ice-caps, strong seasonal winds, etc.)

...or perhaps I should stop eating farmhouse cheddar at bedtime.