Cassini

I, too, am curious about the Iapetus predictions. I'm especially curious since the predictions of Deep Impact look like they were right on target.

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"Regret can only change the future" -Me

"Every judgment teeters on the brink of error. To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty." Frank Herbert, Dune 1965

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Astrodelugeologist</i>
<br />do you think that Cassini's observations of Iapetus confirmed your predictions?<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Cassini confirmed the hemispheric dichotomy, but that has been known about for two centuries. It is the details that are now interesting.

One of those details is that all exploded-planet-caused impacts near the edge of the dark area in the polar regions should be grazing and directed radially away from the middle of the dark area. We first noted that effect some years ago for Neptune's moon Triton, which rotates fast enough that its whole surface, except for the polar region tilted away from the exploding planet, was coated black. And most impacts near the dark-bright boundary near the shielded polar region are grazing and perpendicular to the boundary.

Cassini did indeed see just such an effect for Iapetus too. So the "black axiom" did pass another test. -|Tom|-