V
vogon13
Guest
I have also spent a little time today looking over the Hyperion pictures sent down today.<br /><br />The dark material does not seem to be at a constant depth locally. A crater on a cliff (mesa?) will have a dark bottom elevation higher than the rim of a nearby crater at the base of the cliff, with its dark bottom elevation proportionally lower. A dark layer at a consistent depth beneath the surface that the impactors reveal seems excluded. <br /><br />Shallow, flatter craters seem less likely to have the dark bottom 'staining'. The deeper, steeper bowl shaped craters seem to be stained fairly consistently. Overlapping craters seem much less consistent at first take.<br /><br />I am tenatively convinced the darkening seen is consistent with the steeper white crater walls reflecting more solar energy on to the crater bottoms and making them warm enough to trigger the formation of the dark material. This process is consistent to observations of Iapetus with the difference being the chaotic rotation of Hyperion allows virtually all craters to align sunward sooner or later for this effect to occur and it occurs with radial symmetry (at least on all radially symmetrical craters), whereas on Iapetus, the alignment of the rotation axis causes the fraction of the crater bottoms darkened to be related in shape and percentage to the distance from the equator, an effect of the varying solar insolation throughout the 28+ years for Iapetus (and the rest of the Saturnian system) to travel around the sun.<br /><br />I have not seen any findings yet on the compositon of the dark material on Hyperion. Should it be a match with the dark material on Iapetus, well, that's the clincher, isn't it?<br /><br /><img src="/images/icons/wink.gif" /><br /><br /><br /> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><font color="#ff0000"><strong>TPTB went to Dallas and all I got was Plucked !!</strong></font></p><p><font color="#339966"><strong>So many people, so few recipes !!</strong></font></p><p><font color="#0000ff"><strong>Let's clean up this stinkhole !!</strong></font> </p> </div>