Saturns Ice Moon - Enceladus (Breathtaking!)

titchard said:
They are some stunning pictures - your posts are great and really informative!

On a separate note - regarding the picture of the Moon, if the the Moon always faces the same way, toward Earth - how come it's surface is so riddled with craters? Surely the earth would protect that side of the Moon because of the way it is oriented.

I'm probably forgetting something silly regarding it, but it just made me ponder over my morning coffee!

Rich
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The moons very far away so plenty of space for things to hit it, and has no atmosphere, and no weather, many of those craters will be millions(billions?) of of years old, from when it collected up all the crap orbiting earth after the impact that made it.
 
Sometimes I wish the planet earth orbited a larger planet, just so we could see it in the sky, it must be an absolutely awesome sight. I mean the moon is alright and all, but think what having saturn up there would be like, assuming life had evolved to survive the radiation, mavity etc.
 
very impressive! awesome post have 5 stars.


would it be possible to land there? and collect some samples of ice to see whether there is any sort of life form?
 
Bubo said:
Sometimes I wish the planet earth orbited a larger planet, just so we could see it in the sky, it must be an absolutely awesome sight. I mean the moon is alright and all, but think what having saturn up there would be like, assuming life had evolved to survive the radiation, mavity etc.
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See now..the problem with that...Is the days would be sooooo messed up, random shadowy parts etc more than likely if the larger planet we where orbiting suddenly went in fron of the sun...

Although this would vary a lot, depending on the size of us, the planet we're orbiting, and its distance from us yada yada :p
 
Delvis said:
See now..the problem with that...Is the days would be sooooo messed up, random shadowy parts etc more than likely if the larger planet we where orbiting suddenly went in fron of the sun...

Although this would vary a lot, depending on the size of us, the planet we're orbiting, and its distance from us yada yada :p
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Yes, things like that were kinda covered by the "etc" in my post. I realise just as you do that life if it was possible to evolve on a world orbiting a gas giant at all, would be radically different to the earth as is and probably would evolve past sea born bacteria.. On the bright side, we wouldn't have to wait several decades for total eclipse, there would be one every other day.
 
All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landings there.

With all that ice in our Solar System why the hell are we still stuck on this damn rock?
 
Fibre_Optic said:
enc09_approach.gif

This sequence of 12 frames was taken over a span of about 45 minutes on March 12, 2008. In that brief time, Cassini covered almost 40,000 kilometers in its approach to a flyby encounter with Enceladus. The overexposure and smearing of the images gives a hint of the raw speed involved - 14.4 km/sec (or 32,211 mph). Shortly after this sequence, at its closest, Casini approached within 52 km (32.3 miles) of the surface of Enceladus. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
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Can anyone explain how the stars move like that in relation to the camera, looks well weird, like it changes direction once or twice!?
 
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