The origin of Iapetus's Janus faces is one of the longest standing mysteries in the solar system, one that has persisted since the moon's discovery by the astronomer Giovanni Cassini in 1671. But the ...

Iapetus, a moon of Saturn, reaches its greatest western elongation, resulting in its brightest observable appearance from Earth due to its lighter hemisphere being oriented towards the observer.

SAN FRANCISCO --Iapetus, one of Saturn’s weirdest moons, has an enormous equatorial mountain ridge, a spiky belt that rises 12 miles above the moon’s surface. How Iapetus built that belt – the only ...

For centuries, people wondered how the leopard got its spots. The consensus is pretty solid that evolution played a major role. But it's only been five years since the arrival of high-resolution ...

Two scientists propose an explanation for the bizarre ridge belting Saturn's moon Iapetus at the equator. At one time Iapetus itself may have had a satellite, created by a giant impact with another ...

One of the weirdest of the solar system’s moons is Iapetus. This is a medium-sized (1,471 km (914 miles) satellite of Saturn, orbiting about 3,561,300 km (2,213,000 miles) from the planet. Seen from ...

Imagine a powdered sugar doughnut hole plowing through a cloud of dark-chocolate dust. The resulting two-colored treat would resemble one of Saturn’s weirder moons, Iapetus — an icy world with a ...

On October 25, Saturn's moon Iapetus reaches inferior conjunction, positioned 1.3′ north of Saturn and shining at approximately 11th magnitude, making it easier to observe near its parent planet.

The Cassini spacecraft's flyby of Saturn's moon Iapetus has revealed a bizarre geological feature in its images: a bulging ridge at its equator. Mission scientists have started to release detailed ...

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For centuries, people wondered how the leopard got its spots. The consensus is pretty solid that evolution played a major role. But it’s only been five years since the arrival of high-resolution ...