Abstract:

On June 12, 2007 the Cassini probe sent the images of a small moon of Saturn called Atlas which is located between the ring A and the small ring R/2004 S 1. These images have shown that the Atlas morphology is very different from other moons of similar dimensions. In the present article we propose a reasonable theory, to that we denominated "flying dune", that explains its morphologic characteristics from its magnitudes like mass, diameters and orbital radius, as well as its orbital position and the interpretation of the images caught by the Cassini probe.

- Theory about Atlas morphology

Good grief Well, at least I know what all my emails will be about today...

is this submitted to any journal? I can't see it anywhere...

mmmm excel plots

Umm... the sheer number of typos and plain bad english put me off from reading it through, but the issue I find disturbing is it uses the raw image data that was not yet archived at the PDS. Very unfair to the imaging team. This classifies as an attempted "scoop".

The text is pretty comical. And he does need to keep his hands off those raw JPEGs -- most of what he needs is in the PDS anyway, it's totally unnecessary. But I gotta hand it to him for coming up with the imaginative "flying dune" descriptor.

--Emily

Article originated from discussion in an astronomy forum:

That's possible, but it's just as likely that he simply doesn't know any better.

As regards the poor English, well, it's a bit too easy to criticize people from non-English-speaking countries for this kind of thing. You have to cut them some slack; they've got a huge disadvantage here, compared with native English speakers.

A better idea is to concentrate on the science... which, in this case, *isn't* impressive. The first half reads like a high-school science project. I don't care much for the gravity modelling, either.

This isn't going to make it through review, not at any journal with a positive impact factor.