Iapetus Revealed

As I

mentioned

a few days ago, I'm incredibly excited about Cassini's recently flyby of Saturn's moon Iapetus. Passing only 1,200 km (800 miles) above the surface of the bizarre moon, the spacecraft has captured dozens of new images. Perhaps now planetary geologists can figure out what's caused that amazing ridge, the walnut shape, and the bizarre light and dark hemispheres.

The moment the new Cassini images came in, Emily Lakdawalla from the Planetary Society jumped on them, and started analyzing. She was able to stitch together several images into

a large mosaic

that just looks amazing. Especially that ridge. What is up with that ridge?

There are some original

raw images

available from the flyby from NASA, but I highly recommend you check out

Emily's analysis

while we wait for NASA's official results.