Thursday, August 11, 2005

Icarus (September 2005)

The index for the September issue of Icarus is now online. Icarus is the journal for the American Astronomical Society's Division of Planetary Science. A number of outer satellite papers are in this issue:
The paper by Williams et al. is a good one. It gives a great description of the 2001 eruption at Thor.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

The Neugebauer et al. abstract on Iapetus' thermal inertia is 'curious', because it implies very small grain size...in contrast to the "hard packed' dry ice and water caps on Mars.

At less than 10 Jm^-2K^-1s^-1/2, the measured termal inertial on Iapetus is much less than the nominal minimal inertial capacity of Mars in the polar regions (25Jm^-2K^-1s^-1/2)in the south, ~400 Jm^-2K^-1 s^-1/2 in the northern regions).

source:http://lasp.colorado.edu/inertia/2001/

http://lasp.colorado.edu/inertia/nmap2003.jpg

Perhaps a fine powder, but what kind of powder?

8/14/2005 09:53:00 PM  
Blogger Jason Perry said...

It would seem that the dark material on Iapetus appears to be powdery (or fluffy as the CIRS team called it).

The result isn't "new", as the CIRS team reported a very low thermal inertia back in January:

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA07006

8/15/2005 12:38:00 PM  

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