{"id":26627,"date":"2010-07-29T19:52:20","date_gmt":"2010-07-29T19:52:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/megameter-chasm-on-an-icy-moon-bad-astronomy\/"},"modified":"2010-07-29T19:52:20","modified_gmt":"2010-07-29T19:52:20","slug":"megameter-chasm-on-an-icy-moon-bad-astronomy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/astronomy\/megameter-chasm-on-an-icy-moon-bad-astronomy.php","title":{"rendered":"Megameter chasm on an icy moon | Bad Astronomy"},"content":{"rendered":"

I know I haven’t been posting much astronomy the past few days — Comic Con, w00tstock, and \"Bad Universe\" have kept me hopping — so to make up for it a little bit, here’s a lovely image<\/a> sent back a billion kilometers from Cassini:<\/p>

\"cassini_tethys_canyon\"<\/a><\/p>

This is Tethys, an ice moon of Saturn. The angle of Cassini, Tethys, and the Sun light the moon as a crescent. The most obvious feature is Ithaca Chasma, a (more than) thousand-kilometer-long gash in the side of the object. Note that Tethys is only about 1000 km in diameter, so the chasm runs along a third of the moon’s surface (circumference = diameter x π, remember).<\/p>

How big is that? <\/span>Stand up and take a long stride. That’s about one meter. Now do it 999,999 more times. That’s a megameter: a million meters, or 1000 kilometers. Better pack a lunch.<\/p>

The chasm is billions of years old, and may have formed when water inside the moon froze, expanded, and cracked the surface open. It’s a hundred kilometers across and 3-5 km deep, too. It’s far larger than the Grand Canyon, the largest canyon on Earth.<\/p>

Space is big, and weird, where even small objects have huge features. It’s surprising, but surprising things are the best things to know. <\/p>

Tip o’ the dew shield to Carolyn Porco<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>

<\/p>

Related posts:<\/p>

- An otherwordly eclipse<\/a>
- A billion km distant ice mountain against the black<\/a><\/p>

<\/p><\/em>

<\/a>
<\/a><\/p>

<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I know I haven’t been posting much astronomy the past few days — Comic Con, w00tstock, and \"Bad Universe\" have kept me hopping — so to make up for it a little bit, here’s a lovely image sent back a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"limit_modified_date":"","last_modified_date":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26627"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26627\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}