Posted on 05/31/2021 4:01:29 PM PDT by MtnClimber
Explanation: Whatever hit Mimas nearly destroyed it. What remains is one of the largest impact craters on one of Saturn's smallest round moons. Analysis indicates that a slightly larger impact would have destroyed Mimas entirely. The huge crater, named Herschel after the 1789 discoverer of Mimas, Sir William Herschel, spans about 130 kilometers and is featured here. Mimas' low mass produces a surface gravity just strong enough to create a spherical body but weak enough to allow such relatively large surface features. Mimas is made of mostly water ice with a smattering of rock - so it is accurately described as a big dirty snowball. The featured image was taken during the closest-ever flyby of the robot spacecraft Cassini past Mimas in 2010 while in orbit around Saturn.
For more detail go to the link and click on the image for a high definition image. You can then move the magnifying glass cursor then click to zoom in and click again to zoom out. When zoomed in you can scan by moving the side bars on the bottom and right side of the image.
ibtnm
That’ll buff right out.
Nick should be Titleist.
Death Star
once upon a time that SoB got pelted!! Bigtime!! From every single direction!!! lol...
Lucky for Mimas it has a thin crust with an iron sphere underneath, just like our Moon. (Kidding)
NASA article on types of findings from the 1969-1972 seismographs placed on the Moon by astronauts....
The first three were generally mild and harmless. Shallow moonquakes on the other hand were doozies. Between 1972 and 1977, the Apollo seismic network saw twenty-eight of them; a few “registered up to 5.5 on the Richter scale,” says Neal. A magnitude 5 quake on Earth is energetic enough to move heavy furniture and crack plaster.
Furthermore, shallow moonquakes lasted a remarkably long time. Once they got going, all continued more than 10 minutes. “The moon was ringing like a bell,” Neal says.
On Earth, vibrations from quakes usually die away in only half a minute. The reason has to do with chemical weathering, Neal explains: “Water weakens stone, expanding the structure of different minerals. When energy propagates across such a compressible structure, it acts like a foam sponge—it deadens the vibrations.” Even the biggest earthquakes stop shaking in less than 2 minutes.
lunar seismograms (graph)
The moon, however, is dry, cool and mostly rigid, like a chunk of stone or iron. So moonquakes set it vibrating like a tuning fork. Even if a moonquake isn’t intense, “it just keeps going and going,” Neal says. And for a lunar habitat, that persistence could be more significant than a moonquake’s magnitude.
https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/home/15mar_moonquakes.html
That’s where the Saturnians test their atomic weapons. Only Earth people are stupid enough to do it in their own biosphere.
That's no moon!
John Belushi, on seeing this photo only had one word to describe it, “ZITS”!
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