What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?

Blast from the Past

I reached voting age just after the election of 1980.

This was the time when America was humiliated by the Iranian hostage crisis. The Soviet Union was rampaging throughout the third world and was currently involved in Afghanistan despite our protests. The economy was on the ropes, with double digit unemployment and inflation that briefly reached 18 percent (and that’s the official number…no doubt it was actually worse). The then-president even used the word “malaise.”

Then we beat the Soviet Union in a hockey game.

That sounds trivial, doesn’t it? A frigging hockey game.

But the symbolic value was tremendous. It was a win after a long string of losses…and it ended up being a turning point.

We elected a new president, who didn’t have to do anything at all to resolve that damned hostage crisis. Iran released them on Inauguration Day.

And then there was this song…which expressed the sentiment very well (and doesn’t get played nearly as much as another popular song from back then by the same group does now).

America was on the move again.

Today is the 2nd. On the 5th…we will see what happens. Regardless of the result, it’s going to be rough, either because we lost and we’re done, or because we won and it’s being stolen, in which case if 2020 is any guide, we’re done, or because we won outright, and the Enemy is not going to go down without a lot of ugliness…maybe even kinetic ugliness.

Keep your powder dry. If things go well, this is the turnaround point.

January 6 Tapes?

Where are the tapes? Anyone, Anyone? Bueller? Johnson??

Paging Speaker Johnson…this is your conscience calling you out on broken promises.

News Flash

Today, it is still the case that Joe Biden didn’t Win.

I realize that to some readers, this might be a shock; surely at some point things must change and Biden will have actually won.

But the past cannot actually be changed.

It will always and forever be the case that Joe Biden didn’t win.

And if you, Leftist Lurker, want to dismiss it as dead white cis-male logic…well, you can call it what you want, but then please just go fuck off. No one here buys that bullshit–logic is logic and facts are facts regardless of skin color–and if you gave it a moment’s rational thought, you wouldn’t either. Of course your worthless education never included being able to actually reason–or detect problems with false reasoning–so I don’t imagine you’ll actually wake up as opposed to being woke.

As Ayn Rand would sometimes point out: Yes, you are free to evade reality. What you cannot do is evade the consequences of evading reality. Or to put it concretely: You can ignore the Mack truck bearing down on you as you play in the middle of the street, you won’t be able to ignore the consequences of ignoring the Mack truck.

And Ayn Rand also pointed out that existence (i.e., the sum total of everything that exists) precedes consciousness–our consciousnesses are a part of existence, not outside of it–therefore reality cannot be a “social construct” as so many of you fucked-up-in-the-head people seem to think.

So much for Leftist douchebag lurkers. For the rest of you, the regular readers and those lurkers who understand such things: I continue to carry the banner once also carried by Wheatie. His Fraudulency didn’t win.

Let’s Go, Brandon!!

His Fraudulency

Joe Biteme, properly styled His Fraudulency, continues to infest the White House, we haven’t heard much from the person who should have been declared the victor, and hopium is still being dispensed even as our military appears to have joined the political establishment in knuckling under to the fraud.

One can hope that all is not as it seems.

I’d love to feast on that crow.

(I’d like to add, I find it entirely plausible, even likely, that His Fraudulency is also His Figureheadedness. (Apparently that wasn’t a word; it got a red underline. Well it is now.) Where I differ with the hopium addicts is on the subject of who is really in charge. It ain’t anyone we like.)

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

Spot Prices.

Kitco Ask. Last week:

Gold $2,748.70
Silver $33.77
Platinum $1033.00
Palladium $1219.00
Rhodium $4,950.00
FRNSI* 131.968+
Gold:Silver 81.395-

This week, markets closed as of 3PM MT.

Gold $2,736.50
Silver $32.51
Platinum $1,002.00
Palladium $1,124.00
Rhodium $4,950.00
FRNSI* 131.378+
Gold:Silver 84.174+

Gold touched $2790 on Wednesday, then suffered an extreme beatdown on Thursday. It looked like it might actually recover a bit on Friday but dropped at the end of the day for a net loss. Similar things happened to silver, but it was worse, it dropped much more, in percentage terms, than did gold and Gold:Silver went right back up into 84 territory. The worst beating in percentage terms was palladium…and I tend to think that’s a bad sign; it’s the metal most closely associated with catalytic converters, hence the car industry. However, palladium has a very variable supply, so it could just be it’s slightly more of a glut on the market than it was last week.

*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.

Piling On / Security Alert

OK, how can I pile onto the Flat Earthers and pass on a security alert at the same time, you ask?

Well, because Flat Earth Dave sells an app. For three bucks you get a flat earth clock and can also connect with other Flerfers.

This app has come under scrutiny. And it turns out that Flat Earth Dave doxxed all of his customers.

But before we get to that, a code analysis reveals that the app computes the distance between customers (to help them connect with other flerfers), using the “haversine formula” which is how you compute distances along great circle arcs on a sphere given the two points’ latitude and longitude. In other words Flat Earth Dave’s own code assumes a spherical Earth! (Almost as if he knows something he’s not saying…)

[If you’re curious, it’s where θ is the angle between the two points, φ1 and φ2 are the two points’ latitudes, Δφ is the difference between the two latitudes, and Δλ is the difference between the two longitudes. The haversine is an obscure trig function, (1-cosθ)/2; this appears in spherical trigonometry a lot so they gave it its own name. All angles are in radians, particularly since in spherical trig the sides of triangles are actually great circle arc lengths. Once you have θ, you multiply by the radius of the Earth to get the distance in miles or kilometers.]

But we already know Flat Earth Dave is a scum-sucking liar and a hypocrite, because after years of saying he’d love to go to Antarctica to show the sun sets there during Antarctic summer…he turned down the opportunity to do so…clearly knowing he’d be proven wrong but as long as he doesn’t go on the trip he can try to tapdance around the fact that he’s full of shit and knows he’s full of shit.

The bigger issue here is that it’s pretty easy for a hacker to query the app’s server database without even logging in to the app. So they can get hold of everyone’s location, name, and password. (The password is stored in the clear, which is something any computer professional knows not to do. This is the computer science equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot or poking out your own eyeball with a soup spoon.) So if you bought the app and logged in, whatever password you used on that app…which hopefully isn’t the same as a password you use anywhere else, like (say) your online banking or even worse your email…has been compromised.

So if you trusted Flat Earth Dave, you’ve been conned and doxxed. And you won’t be getting your three bucks back (nor the $11/year if you subscribed). Have a nice day.

A different treatment of the same topic, combined with some debunks. A bit long so I certainly wouldn’t expect you to watch it.

Saturn’s Other Moons

Titan, covered last week, is by far the largest of Saturn’s moons. The other 145 (!) moons put together–plus all of the matter in the rings–don’t have even 5 percent of the mass of Titan.

Size notwithstanding much of interest here. With Saturn we encounter our first medium-sized major moons, there are nine in the Solar System and Saturn has four of them. They are (in order from Saturn outwards): Tethys, Dione, Rhea (closer than Titan) and Iapetus (beyond Titan). All have diameters of over 1000 kilometers. All except Iapetus orbit closer to Saturn than Titan. In addition to that, there are two of the medium-small major moons as well, Mimas and Enceladus (both are closer than Tethys) and one comparably sized moon that is not major (meaning, it isn’t round), Hyperion (between Titan and Iapetus). We’ll cover each of these seven moons in detail further down.

(If nothing else, after working on this post for a few days I now have the order of the big eight moons from Saturn outwards, memorized.)

If you remember Saturn once having nine moons (possibly from school in the 1960s) the ones I just mentioned are eight of those nine, with the other one being Phoebe…which is in a totally different class, and much further away than the other eight. I’ll say a bit about that one too. (I’m not quite that old, but a lot of stuff I did see in school in the 1970s was out of date and said “nine.”)

But Saturn has a host of other much smaller moons, too, and in many cases they’re interesting because of their interactions with the rings.

Twenty four of the moons are regular, meaning: They orbit in or near Saturn’s equatorial plane in prograde orbits–the one exception to that is Iapetus, considered regular even though it has a fairly high inclination of 7.57 degrees. Every one of the moons (except Phoebe) I just mentioned are regular moons.

The other 122 moons are all irregular, generally small and insignificant, similar to the mess we had at Jupiter. Saturn has more stuff close to the planet than Jupiter does, but fewer “big categories” overall. There’s also a major distinction here between “Inner” and “Outer” moons; inner moons are either inside the very tenuous E Ring, or actually within it. What’s the E Ring? I’ll discuss it some below, but here’s a reminder:

Inner Moons (Inside or Within the E Ring)

Ring Moonlets actually orbit within the Rings. They’re significantly larger than the average, run-of-the-mill ring chunk, but none are of significant size. They are interesting, though because of their interactions with the rings. All are regular, which makes sense because they actually orbit within the “big” rings. Only one has an official number (S/2009 S-1); it’s about 300 m across. Others get down as low as 40 m across, and are not part of the total count.

Ring Shepherds can either be within the rings, or just barely outside of them, and they either keep the ring particles from leaving the rings, or causing gaps to form within the rings. There are four of these, with the most famous being Pan, about 27 km across, which looks like a ravioli. The others are Daphnis, Atlas, and Prometheus.

There are four other small moons well outside the rings, but still pretty close to them in the grand scheme of things. One of these is the tenth moon I knew about as a kid, but it’s a bit confusing because one astronomer spotted the tenth moon, then another one saw it…but in totally the wrong place in its orbit, which threw doubt onto the original observation (as well as this observation). Eventually we realized that there were two moons, Epimetheus and Janus, in the same orbit but different positions in the orbit, and so they are now regarded as the tenth and eleventh moons of Saturn, respectively. So those books from my childhood were written when we didn’t realize yet that Saturn actually had 11 known moons. The other two in this group are Pandora and Aegaeon.

Then we get to the Inner major moons, the first of which is Mimas which I will discuss below.

There are three small moons orbiting between Mimas and the next major moon; again these are all regular moons, these are the Alkonyides group.

Next are more major moons, Enceladus, Tethys and Dione. I’ll discuss each one in detail below.

Tethys and Dione both have two Trojan moons (sharing the same orbit but sixty degrees away from their bigger companion); a bit more on that below too. So far the only moons anywhere in the solar system known to have Trojans are these two.

So far: four major moons (two medium size, two medium-small), one dinky moon with only a number, the four shepherds and four close-in moons, the three Alkonyides, the four Trojans, total 20. All are regular moons, which means there are four remaining regular moons and all 122 irregular moons to go.

Outer Moons (Outside the E Ring)

Outer Big: Rhea, Titan, Hyperion and Iapetus. (All of these will be covered in some detail below.) Were it not for Hyperion, which is not a major moon, just kind of big but lumpy, these could be called the outer major moons. All are regular, even Iapetus with its significant orbital inclination. [Note: Wikipedia calls these the Outer Large moons, but I don’t want to confuse that use of the word “large” with the way I’ve been using it to denote the planetary-sized moons of the solar system.]

And with the last four regular moons checked off, we have nothing left but the entire list of 122 irregular moons. They’re considered irregular because of their eccentric, inclined orbits. These can be broken down into four groups with similar orbits, the Inuit group (13) inclined at about 47 degrees, the Gallic group (7) inclined at about 35-40 degrees, the Norse group (100, including Phoebe) which are all retrograde with inclinations about 170 degrees), then two more “miscellaneous” moons that are prograde. As with Jupiter, it’s likely each of these groups has some sort of common origin (but separate from the other groups). Also the names of the groups indicate the naming convention, with the Norse group named after Norse gods…except for Phoebe which was discovered long before the others were, there was no hint until much later that there was a “group” here. (This isn’t the first, nor will it be the last, time that some body that had been known for a while turned out to be the first of a big group of similar objects.)

The overall summary is in this diagram (which you may want to right-click on to give it full-screen in another tab):

The upper stripe is a fairly conventional side view of Saturn including showing the A through E rings, and most of the Inner Moons including the four majors, Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys and Dione (two are medium sized, two are medium-small).

The middle stripe steps out ten times, and Saturn is now shown at a tilt. The four “Outer Big” moons (one actually large, two medium sized, and one medium-small (and not major) are here. Note that Iapetus is not in the same plane as the others. Here you’ll see lines drawn through each of the four moons; these actually denote the range of possible distances for those moons, meaning they’re in moderately elliptical orbits.

The last diagram zooms out ten times again, or 100 times the first, and shows all of the irregular satellites, at their orbital inclinations. The Norse group has a HUGE range of distances from Saturn, indicating they are all in highly elliptical orbits.

The Big Ones

With the big picture out of the way, let’s go back to those Major Moons (plus Hyperion). And I’ll toss in Phoebe as a bonus, because there’s some interesting things about it too. Let’s start with a table. But first, I need to explain a couple of things. The “A” Ring is the outermost readily visible ring. The “E” ring, on the other hand is very tenuous, discovered in 1907 but not confirmed until 1980…and we’ll soon see how it came to be.

Moon	Distance From Saturn, 1000s of Km; and (in terms of Titan)	Orbital Period, days	Diameter, km	Discovery year and (order)
Outer edge of A ring	136.8
Inner edge of E ring	180.0
Mimas	186.0 (0.152)	0.942	396.4	1789 (7)
Enceladus	238.4 (0.195)	1.370	504.2	1789 (6)
Tethys	295.0 (0.241)	1.888	1062.2	1684 (5)
Dione	377.7 (0.309)	2.737	1122.8	1684 (4)
Outer edge of E ring	480.0
Rhea	527.2 (0.431)	4.518	1527.5	1672 (3)
Titan	1221.9 (1.000)	15.945	5149.5	1655 (1)
Hyperion	1481.5 (1.212)	21.277	~270.0 (not spherical)	1848 (8)
Iapetus	3561.7 (2.915)	79.331	1468.6	1671 (2)
Phoebe (Bonus)	12929.4 (10.581)	550.3 (retrorgrade)	213.0	1898 (9)

These moons are all consecutive, with no intervening small stuff, except for the three Alkyonides between Mimas and Enceladus, and the four Trojan moons of Tethys and Dione.

All of these moons, except Hyperion and Phoebe, are tidally locked to Saturn, displaying the same side towards Saturn at all times, like our Moon does to Earth.

Mimas

Cassini discovered Iapetus, Rhea, Dione and Tethys in the mid-late 1600s. He also discovered the Cassini Division between the A (outermost easily visible) and B (inside the A ring, wider but a bit dimmer) rings, plainly visible even in the photograph I supplied above. The Cassini division is about 4800 kilometers across, and it is actually caused by Mimas; anything orbiting in the gap is in a 2:1 resonance with Mimas (meaning: orbiting twice as fast) and the regular pulls by Mimas in the same places tend to nudge particles out of that orbit…hence the gap. However, it’s not completely empty.

Mimas is the seventh largest moon of Saturn; it just barely makes it into the “medium-small” major class. It’s most notable feature is a very large (compared to it) crater, named after Herschel (who discovered Mimas in 1789 and did not try to name it after King George the Turd), that instantly earned it the nickname “Death Star Moon” since Star Wars was a recent memory when the Voyager spacecraft first photographed it. Look, twins separated at birth:

(I was in high school and at least one photograph from a different angle that was published looked distinctly…weapons grade to many of us. However, at roughly 64K surface temperature, it’s colder than a witch’s.)

Since we’ve sent Cassini through the system, we have seen the different moons’ gravity acting on it and can assess the masses of these moons. Sizes can be measured off the photographs (since distance is known). Dividing mass by volume, we can get a good idea of the density of these moons. It turns out that Mimas’ density is 1.15 times that of water, implying it’s mostly ice with some rocks in it. (But remember, at these temperatures, ice itself is as hard as a rock.)

Enceladus

If when you say it, Enceladus comes out something like “enchiladas” you’re doing it wrong. It’s “en-SELL-a-duss.” Like the other major moons, it’s named after a titan from Greek mythology. There was a time when the gods fought the titans (who were the previous generation), this is called the “gigantomachy.” According to the legend, Athena picked up a gigantic rock and dropped it on Enceladus. It didn’t kill him but apparently he couldn’t push it off of him and it’s still there. Every once in a while Enceladus will twitch and there is an earthquake. (To this day the Greeks will reference that in talking about earthquakes.) The rock, by the way, is now Sicily. (I told you it’s still there.)

Enceladus is one of two moons in the solar system that are in the 500-1000 km diameter range…and it just barely makes it at 504 km. (The other is Dysnomia, estimated to be about 615k km across, which orbits the dwarf planet Eris. We can’t determine if Dysnomia is rounded or not–it’s very hard to see because it is so dark but it’s got a low enough density that it might not have strong enough gravity to crush itself into a spherical shape. And I missed this one when I first did my Moon Roundup–which I have since edited to reflect the fact that Dysnomia exists.)

Enceladus is the most reflective object in the solar system, it’s blast white. Which means it’s clean, which means fresh. And in fact, Enceladus has volcanoes on it, clustered near its south pole, that regularly renew the surface. But unlike the ones on Jupiter’s inner major moon Io, these erupt water.

That is not a black and white photograph (nor will other moons be shown in black and white), It’s just that these moons are neutrally colored. As such people will try to punch it up a bit. So, seen almost as often as that picture is a false-color image, like this one:

The blue brings up the “tiger stripe” ridges rather well, and these are tectonic features, from the icy surface breaking into “plates”. (That implies another subsurface “ocean” like on Europa and Titan.) Some are canyons 5-10 km wide and a kilometer deep.

Enceladus has a density 1.6 times that of water, so it has a much higher percentage of rocks in it than does Mimas.

At least some volcanoes–well strictly speaking these are geysers–are still active, here’s an oblique shot of the south polar region:

This stuff is coming from the subsurface ocean. And because of that subsurface ocean and evident sources of heat, Enceladus is being thought of as yet another candidate for life to exist.

Cassini nearly didn’t get to see this. On one Enceladus flyby one of the scientists, Professor Michele Dougherty, noticed what she called a “pimple” in the magnetometer readings, caused by moving ionized water. She managed to persuade the JPL Cassini team to change the schedule of flybys to get much closer to Enceladus. (This was a huge risk–if they found nothing, a lot of irreplaceable fuel would be gone for nothing, and perhaps the magnetometer team would not be taken seriously again.) It paid off, bigly: the lead investigator for the camera, Doctor Carolyn Porco, said she nearly fell off her chair when she saw the pictures of the geysers.

This is the only confirmed liquid water in the solar system, other than on Earth.

We have talked of going ice fishing on Europa. But here, there’s no need to drill! We can send a spacecraft through the plumes and analyze the vapor, to perhaps see what’s in the water. Biomolecules? Life?

These volcanoes have been venting so prolifically, in fact, that Enceladus is the primary source of the E ring. (By happy coincidence, Enceladus starts with E, so it’s a good mnemonic.) If you need more evidence:

Tethys

Tethys is another ball of ice, neutral colored and almost as bright as Enceladus. What sets it apart is that its density is 0.98 that of water, indicating it must be almost pure ice…and likely porous to boot.

Although not as obvious as Herschel is on Mimas, there is a large impact crater here too, named Odysseus.

Tethys has two other moons occupying its orbit, one 60 degrees ahead at Lagrange Point 4 (L4), named Telesto, the other 60 degrees behind at Lagrange Point 5 (L5), Calypso. This is actually a special solution to the three body problem, bodies placed at those two points are very stable. Objects like these are called “Trojans”. (Jupiter has thousands of Trojan asteroids.)

Dione

Dione is less icy than Tethys, with a density 1.48 times that of water. For some reason, its trailing hemisphere is darker than its leading hemisphere. (What is a trailing (or leading) hemisphere? Since this moon is tidally locked, it always has the same side facing Saturn; that means it also has the same side “facing” the direction it moves in it’s orbit; that’s the leading hemisphere and the other hemisphere is the trailing hemisphere.)

The trailing hemisphere has “wispy” features seen by the Voyager probes, which turn out to be ice cliffs several hundred meters high. The cliffs are formed by tectonic forces and the bright “wisps” are actually the fresh faces of the cliffs. In fact Dione has a lot of fractures on the trailing hemisphere.

In case you’re thinking I am lying about these gray-white pictures being color images, here’s Dione with Saturn in the background. The sun is shining from below the viewer, and you can see shadows of the rings on Saturn in the upper right.

Dione also has Trojans, Helene (leading) and Polydeuces (trailing).

Rhea

Now we leave the inner moons, and go to the outer regular moons, the ones completely outside the E ring.

Rhea is the second largest moon of Saturn and the second largest “medium size” moon in the Solar System (edged out by Uranus’s Titania), but bear in mind with Titan having 96 percent of the mass of all moons and rings in it, Rhea is a very distant second to Titan.

In many ways it’s similar to Dione, perhaps a bit less dense at 1.24 times water, it’s basically 3/4 ice. It has the same leading/trailing distinction, with wispy features that turn out to be cliffs, just like Dione.

Rhea might actually have a ring of its own, a very tenuous one–and that would be a first for a moon. Some indirect evidence (changes in the flow of electrons in Saturn’s magnetic field) points towards it, but Cassini was unable to image it or otherwise confirm it…so it may be necessary to explain that evidence in other ways.

Titan

(Covered last week, but to recap: 5149.5 km across, orbiting at 1,221,900 km in 15.945 days).

Hyperion

Now we come to an oddity. Hyperion is one of the largest objects in the solar system that is not round even though it’s not all that much smaller than Mimas.

When faced with something like this, one asks why Hyperion in particular did not collapse into a sphere. And the reason for that is it’s very light for its size…you could even joke about it being the styrofoam moon. The density is 0.54 times that of water. As such it has only 15% of the mass of Mimas, which is the smallest known body that is made spherical by gravity.

How can this be? Well, take a look:

It looks like a giant sponge! It has a porosity of 0.46 (which makes me wonder how one puts a number on porisity so down a Wikipedia rabbit hole I go and…ah yes, that means it’s 46 percent empty space).

Interestingly, it’s not tidally locked to Saturn. Instead it is chaotically tumbling, rotating around multiple axes at once. This is the only regular satellite in the solar system that is not tidally locked to its primary. (Remember that “regular” satellites are ones in low inclination nearly circular orbits; these tend to be close-in to the primary.) Because its rotation is actually chaotic, it’s very difficult to predict how it’s going to be oriented at some time in the future.

It may not be tidally locked to Saturn, but it is in an orbital resonance with Titan. In the time it takes Titan to orbit Saturn four times, Hyperion orbits three times.

Another thing that makes this moon a change of pace is that it’s not blast white; it seems to be covered by a thin layer of dark material, likely hydrocarbons.

Iapetus

(Pronounced EYE-app-et-us.) Much further out than the others, this is at the edge of the regular moons. This moon is another oddball, a relief after several moons that seem very much alike other than their size. First, its orbital plane is actually inclined by 15 degrees to Saturn’s equator, so from this moon you can actually see the rings tilted rather nicely. Here is an illustration of the situation:

Iapetus is famous for having its leading hemisphere be as dark as coal while its trailing hemisphere is bright, about as bright as Europa. Thus, when its on one side of its orbit (as seen from anywhere far away from Saturn, such as Earth) it’s quite bright, on the other side, it’s quite dark (actually too dark for the telescope that discovered Iapetus), it could almost be thought of as a blinking beacon.

Or, if you’re Arthur C. Clarke, there’s no “almost” about it; it’s a blinking beacon.

We’ve all seen or at least heard of the iconic movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was based on Arthur C. Clarke’s (1917-2008) novel of the same name. There is, however, one very big difference between the book and the novel.

[Possible spoiler]. In the movie, an alien artifact, a “monolith” is excavated on the Moon; when the sun hits the unburied monolith for the first time, it blasts a loud radio signal. The book is the same way; the monolith is “phoning home” telling its makers that someone–presumably a new intelligent species (us!)–has found it.

[More spoiler] The difference is, in the movie the signal is aimed at Jupiter. In the book, it’s aimed at Iapetus, the blinking beacon. In the book, the already scheduled mission to Jupiter is changed…it’s now going to be a one-way trip to Saturn (with a Jupiter flyby), with the astronauts all going into cold sleep at Saturn to await retrieval by the next mission–once they’ve looked around a bit at Iapetus. It turns out that there’s a monolith waiting for them there, right smack dab in the center of a clearly artificial white oval that accounts for Iapetus’ bright side (making it look like a pupil in an eye). In the movie, of course, the Monolith is orbiting Jupiter. The result of getting close to the monolith is the same in both cases. Had they decided to go to Saturn in the movie, you’d have seen some different special effects (Saturn as a crescent, perhaps; that’s mentioned in the book–instead of Jupiter and the Galilean moons).

[Spoiler, this time for the sequel 2010]. When Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2010, the sequel, he decided to make it a sequel to the movie, reasoning more readers were likely to be familiar with it than the book. And this turned out to be lucky because he was able to leverage off the possibility that Europa has life. The 2010 movie leaves out the Chinese probe that was destroyed by Europan life. The hostility in the book was between China and everyone else, not between the US and the Soviet Union (who were fairly friendly to each other). The movie kept all the power of the book, but removed the Chinese subplot of the fatal discovery of life on Europa (it was there anyway) and added in a nasty dash of propagandizing about Reagan’s Central American policies. If you enjoyed the movie I recommend the book.

OK back to Iapetus. The coloring disparity is even more apparent when one makes a map of Iapetus. There’s little detail in the dark areas, because, frankly, we can’t sucking fee that well there:

The dark region is named Cassini Regio.

Iapetus has one other unusual feature…a raised ridge running along the equator, now named the Voyager Mountains. This was first hinted at by Voyager, which passed over Iapetus’s north polar regions. The ridge is 20 km or so wide, and 13 km tall (over 50 percent higher than Everest is above sea level). There are peaks that go up as much as 20 km. There are places where it forks, has three parallel areas. However…this ridge is in the dark zone. On the bright side, there is still a string of isolated 10km tall mountains along the equator. Given Iapetus is considerably smaller than Earth, this is a very prominent feature, as you can see here:

We aren’t clear on why this ridge formed. Nothing suggested explains why it follows the equator so well. And no suggestion explains why it only appears in the Cassini Regio (dark area).

As a final treat, here’s an enhanced picture. On my system at least, I can even see the equatorial ridge on the far right.

Phoebe

This one’s a bonus (though if you’ve made it this far, you might deem it more a case of me prolonging your suffering); it’s not a major moon, it’s not one of those five almost-major moons comparable to the medium-small major moons…it’s an irregular moon, basically trash picked up by the planet. But we’ve known about it for quite some time, and it’s pretty large for a “trash” moon.

Phoebe was actually the first object Cassini flew by. Cassini’s arrival was deliberately timed so that it would be able to encounter this irregular moon, but of course once in orbit about Saturn it never came out this far ever again. But that does make Phoebe the best-known irregular moon.

Phoebe orbits “backwards” or retrograde (the second largest object in the Solar System to do so), so it’s thought to be a captured asteroid like object, only from the outer parts of the Solar System, the Kuiper belt (we’ll get to those). It’s also in a highly inclined orbit. Here is an animation (note the faint lines showing distance above and below Saturn’s equatorial plane). The light blue object is Titan.

Phoebe appears to be differentiated (denser stuff in the center) so it’s possible it was once spherical and got warped by repeated impacts.

It’s much too far away from Saturn to have become tidally locked, and isn’t. It rotates in nine hours and 16 minutes, rather than once every 18 months as it would if it were tidally locked.

Phoebe is the source of the “Phoebe ring,” a very tenuous ring of debris about Saturn, thought to be the result of stuff blown off of Phoebe by meteoroid impacts. The ring matches Phoebe’s orbit, so it is inclined to Saturn’s other rings. Here is an artist’s illustration (note they had to blow up Saturn).

Phoebe has the distinction of being used as the alien weapon in the recent SF series The Expanse.

Well, that’s all. folks! Saturn has the most major moons of any of the planets or even dwarf planets…so from here on out things should get a little bit easier, at least so long as we are looking at planets. (It will also help that we’ve flown past everything from here on out exactly once and never sent an orbiter–so we know next to nothing about anything out there.)

I’ll conclude with pictures of Giovanni Domenico Cassini (8 June 1625 – 14 September 1712), discoverer of four moons and the Cassini division in the rings…

and Christiaan Huygens, 14 April 1629 – 8 July 1695, discoverer of Titan and the first to realize Saturn had rings. (The original Dutch pronunciation is [ˈkrɪstijaːn ˈɦœyɣə(n)s] [sound file of pronunciation] which just goes to prove the Dutch adage that Dutch isn’t a language it is a throat condition.)

The next planet out is Uranus, but I’ve already done the planet (the Hugh Janus of the Solar System: https://www.theqtree.com/2023/12/30/2023%C2%B712%C2%B730-joe-biden-didnt-win-daily-thread/) so after a short recap (because our wits are all dulled from listening to Kamaltoe Hairyass for the last few months), we can go directly to Uranus’s bevy of medium and medium-small moons next time.

What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?

Speaker Johnson: A Reminder.

And MTG is there to help make it stick.

January 6 tapes. A good start…but then nothing.

Were you just hoping we’d be distracted by the first set and not notice?

Are you THAT kind of “Republican”?

Are you Kevin McCarthy lite?

What are you waiting for?

I have a personal interest in this issue.

And if you aren’t…what the hell is wrong with you?

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

Spot (i.e., paper) Prices

Last week:

Gold $2,657.70
Silver $31.60
Platinum $995.00
Palladium $1,088.00
Rhodium $5,075.00
FRNSI* 127.566+
Gold:Silver 84.104+

This week, 3PM Mountain Time, Kitco “ask” prices. Markets have closed for the weekend.

Gold $2,720.80
Silver $33.78
Platinum $1,023.00
Palladium $1,106.00
Rhodium $5,100.00
FRNSI* 130.618-
Gold:Silver 80.545-

The attention is on gold for bursting through the $2700 line. And the FRNSI is now over 130. At what point does it become worthwhile to simply wipe your butt with dollar bills rather than lugging them around in your wallet? (Honestly, though, they aren’t absorbent enough…so probably, never.)

As I said the attention is on gold…but silver should not be neglected! It has gone up over two dollars over the past week, and (net) almost all of that was on Friday after four days of almost no net movement. It went up $2.03 on Friday or 6.4 percent. (Versus gold going up 1.05 percent on Friday) And you can see the effect in the Gold:Silver ratio. In terms of silver, gold dropped over three and a half ounces.

Even platinum went up more on a percentage basis Friday than did gold.

*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.

Flat Earther Influencers are Mostly Lying Sacks of Shit

The Final Experiment continues to make waves in the Flat Earth Community.

I will link a relevant video below, but I’ll summarize here.

After years of happily saying that a 24 hour sun in Antarctica during southern summer (with it doing a 360 around the viewer over the course of a day) would disprove the Flat Earth viewpoint, but then saying “yeah but you can’t go to Antarctica” or flatly asserting that the sun does set in Antarctica, and furthermore that they’d love to go to Antarctica and see…

They’re for the most part refusing to go take a look. Everything from whining about how they’d have to deal with globe-earth “trolls” on the trip to…well, I don’t know what other rationales they have. There are three, maybe four going. (Four is if you count Candace Owens’ producer.)

Plenty of globe earthers are going, and at least a couple of them have vowed to take down their content and replace it with a video stating that the Earth is flat…if the sun sets during the five days they are at 79+ degrees south latitude.

Meanwhile other flerfers have begged the three that are going, not to go, or have already accused them of being shills. (Interesting. Before they even report back what they have seen, they are already bought off shills. Almost as if the accusers already know they will be reporting back that the Sun did not set!

One would think that if the flerfers are so confident of their position, they would positively relish the prospect of their final victory over the globers, as they point to the twighlight and say “So, Dave, where’s the sun?!?!” as they film McKeegan’s humiliation for their own channels!

That is how they would behave if they were really thinking of themselves as people with some special insight who have had their viewpoint put down and suppressed; they would love to have their day in the court of the brute fact that the sun went down in Antarctica during Antarctic summer.

Instead, with the exception of those who are actually going on the trip, they are acting like knowing con-men whose jig is about to be up.

Those reading this who have accepted the flerfer claims might just want to think about that. That should speak louder to you than all their shitty geometry, bogus astronomy, and physics claims which (let’s face it) should not have fooled any educated adult. The sad, blunt truth of the matter is that you have been suckered.

No Science Post This Week (Sorry)

A lot of distractions this week.

What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?

January 6 Tapes?

Paging Speaker Johnson…this is your conscience calling you out on broken promises.

For all your high talk about your Christian moral background…you’re looking less and less like you have any kind of moral background.

If You are a Patriot and Don’t Loathe RINOs…

Let’s talk about RINOs, and why they are the lowest form of life in politics.

Many patriots have been involved with politics, often at the grassroots, for decades. We’ve fought, and fought, and fought and won the occasional illusory small victory.

Yet we can’t seem to win the war, even when we have BIG electoral wins.

I am reminded of something. The original Star Trek had an episode titled Day of the Dove. It was one of the better episodes from the third season, but any fan of the original series will tell you that’s a very low bar. Still, it seems to get some respect; at a time when there were about 700 episodes of Star Trek in its various incarnations out there, it was voted 99th best out of the top 100.

In sum, the plot is that an alien entity has arranged for 39 Enterprise crew, and 39 Klingons, to fight each other endlessly with swords and other muscle-powered weapons. The entity lives off of hostile emotions, you see and it wants a captive food source. (The other 400 or so Enterprise crew are trapped below decks and unable to help.) Each side has its emotions played and amplified by the alien entity; one Enterprise junior officer has false memories implanted of a brother who was killed by Klingons. The brother didn’t even exist.

Even people killed in a sword fight miraculously heal so they can go do it again.

The second best line of the episode is when Kang, the Klingon captain, notes that though they have won quite a number of small victories including capturing Engineering, can’t seem to actually finally defeat the Enterprise crew. He growls, “What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?*”

Indeed. He may have been the bad guy, but his situation should sound familiar.

We are a majority in this country. We have a powerful political party in our corner. There is endless wrangling.

And yet,

What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?

In our case, that power is the RINOs in our midst. They specialize in caving when on the verge of victory. Think of Obamacare’s repeal failing…by one Republican vote. Think of the way we can never seem to get spending under control (and now our entire tax revenue goes to pay interest on the debt; anything the government actually does now is with borrowed money).

We have a party…that refuses to do what we want it to do, and that refusal is institutionalized. If you’ve been involved with GOP politics, but haven’t seen this, it’s because you refuse to see it. Or because you are part of the problem yourself. (If so, kindly gargle some red fuming nitric acid to clear the taste of shit out of your mouth, and let those not part of the problem alone so they can read this.)

We fight to elect people, who then take a dive when in office. But it’s not just the politicians in office, it’s the people behind the scenes, the leaders of the national, state and county branches of the party. Their job is to ensure that real patriots never get onto the general election ballot. They’re allowed a few failures…who can then become token conservatives who will somehow never manage to win (Jordan), or can be compromised outright (Lauren Boebert?).

That way it doesn’t actually matter who has a congressional majority. I remember my excitement when the GOP took the Senate in 1980. But all that did was empower a bunch of “moderate” puddles of dog vomit like…well for whatever reason forty years later the most memorable name is Pete Domenici. And a couple of dozen other “moderates” who simply had no interest in doing what grassroots people in their party–those same grassroots people who had worked so hard to elect them–wanted them to do.

Oh, they’ll put up a semblance of a fight…but never win. And they love it when we fight the Dems instead of fighting them. Just like that alien entity, whose motto surely was “Let’s you and him fight. It’ll be delicious!”

If you think about it, your entire political involvement has come to nothing because of these walking malignant tumors.

That should make you good and mad.

The twenty five who blocked Jordan, and the hundred people who took that opportunity to stab Jordan in the back in the secret ballot should make you good and mad.

I’ll close this with another example of RINO backstabbing, an infuriating one close to home.

In my county, the GOP chair is not a RINO. She got elected when the grassroots had had enough of the RINOs. Unfortunately the state organization is full of RINOs, and the ousted county RINOs have been trying to form a new “Republican Party” and get the state GOP to recognize them as the affiliate. I’m honestly amazed it hasn’t happened yet.

In other words those shitstains won’t just leave when they get booted out; they’ll try to destroy what they left behind. It’s an indication that they know we know how important that behind-the-scenes party power is.

So they must be destroyed. That’s the only way they’ll ever stop.

We cannot win until the leeches “on our side” get destroyed.

What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?*

We know it. What is going to be done about it?

*NOTE: The original line was actually “What power is it that supports our battle yet starves our victory.” I had mis-remembered it as feeds. When I checked it, it sure enough was “supports” and that’s what I originally quoted. On further reflection, though, I realized my memory was actually an improvement over the reality, because feeds is a perfect contrast with starves. I changed it partway through the day this originally posted, but now (since this is a re-run) it gets rendered this way from the start.

If one must do things wrong, one should do them wrong…right.

RINOs an Endangered Species?
If Only!

According to Wikipoo, et. al., the Northern White Rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) is a critically endangered species. Apparently two females live on a wildlife preserve in Sudan, and no males are known to be alive. So basically, this species is dead as soon as the females die of old age. Presently they are watched over by armed guards 24/7.

Biologists have been trying to cross them with the other subspecies, Southern White Rhinoceroses (Rhinoceri?) without success; and some genetic analyses suggest that perhaps they aren’t two subspecies at all, but two distinct species, which would make the whole project a lot more difficult.

I should hope if the American RINO (Parasitus rectum pseudoconservativum) is ever this endangered, there will be heroic efforts not to save the species, but rather to push the remainder off a cliff. Onto punji sticks. With feces smeared on them. Failing that a good bath in red fuming nitric acid will do.

But I’m not done ranting about RINOs.

The RINOs (if they are capable of any introspection whatsoever) probably wonder why they constantly have to deal with “populist” eruptions like the Trump-led MAGA movement. That would be because the so-called populists stand for absolutely nothing except for going along to get along. That allows the Left to drive the culture and politics.

Given the results of our most recent elections, the Left will now push harder, and the RINOs will now turn even squishier than they were before.

I well remember 1989-1990 in my state when the RINO establishment started preaching the message that a conservative simply couldn’t win in Colorado. Never mind the fact that Reagan had won the state TWICE (in 1984 bringing in a veto-proof state house and senate with him) and GHWB had won after (falsely!) assuring everyone that a vote for him was a vote for Reagan’s third term.

This is how the RINOs function. They push, push, push the line that only a “moderate” can get elected. Stomp them when they pull that shit. Tell everyone in ear shot that that’s exactly what the Left wants you to think, and oh-by-the-way-Mister-RINO if you’re in this party selling the same message as the Left…well, whythefuckexactly are you in this party, you lying piece of rancid weasel shit?

Justice

It says “Justice” on the picture.

And I’m sure someone will post the standard joke about what the fish thinks about the situation.

But what is it?

Here’s a take, from a different context: It’s about how you do justice, not the justice that must be done to our massively corrupt government and media. You must properly identify the nature of a person, before you can do him justice.

Ayn Rand, On Justice (speaking through her character John Galt, in Atlas Shrugged):

Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification—that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero—that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions—that to withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement—that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit—and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence.

Ayn Rand identified seven virtues, chief among them rationality. The other six, including justice, she considered subsidiary because they are essentially different aspects and applications of rationality.

—Ayn Rand Lexicon (aynrandlexicon.com)

Justice Must Be Done.

Trump, it is supposed, had some documents.

Biden and company stole the country.

I’m sure enough of this that I put my money where my mouth is.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system. (This doesn’t necessarily include deposing Joe and Hoe and putting Trump where he belongs, but it would certainly be a lot easier to fix our broken electoral system with the right people in charge.)

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2024 or 2026 is pointless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud in the system is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

This will necessarily be piecemeal, state by state, which is why I am encouraged by those states working to change their laws to alleviate the fraud both via computer and via bogus voters. If enough states do that we might end up with a working majority in Congress and that would be something Trump never really had.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

Spot Prices

Last week:

Gold $2,658.90
Silver $31.72
Platinum $1,010.00
Palladium $1,038.00
Rhodium $5,100.00
FRNSI* 127.624+
Gold:Silver 83.824+

This week, at Friday close:

Gold $2,654.30
Silver $32.26
Platinum $999.00
Palladium $1,038.00
Rhodium $5,025.00
FRNSI* 127.402-
Gold:Silver 82.278+

Interestingly silver did fairly well this week (it’s now worth more than 1/83rd of an ounce of gold now), gold, on the other hand, is slightly down, Platinum seems to be the biggest loser this week.

*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.

How QR Codes Work

A Common Phenomenon

Regardless of what you think about Flat Earth, this video should serve to illustrate a common mistake that I see many “conspiracy theorists” (the stupid kind I mean) make.

Basically the man in question went to the NBC website and saw a distorted version of this very famous, even iconic photograph, which even has a nickname, the Blue Marble, because when it came out in the early 1970s there was all sorts of buzz about how the Earth was a Big Blue Marble (great way to propagandize the kiddies!):

…and then proceeded on the implicit assumption that the distortion was the original. In the distortion, it appears as though the Red Sea (between Egypt and Saudi Arabia) was cut in half. Since it isn’t in fact cut in half, he assumed this was proof that the Blue Marble photo was originally faked. (BTW this photo should be 3000 pixels across if you want to fullscreen it, etc. As a bonus, it shows Antarctica so that’s doubly annoying to flerfers.)

When he did a bit more searching for the image, including on the NASA website, he started finding the actual original (with properly rendered Red Sea) a lot and assumed that NASA or someone had been going all over the web and cleaning up their mistakes…except, apparently, on NBC’s website, which somehow got overlooked.

I can assure anyone here who might actually think this guy is onto something and the distortion is the real version, that I have print books from the 1970s that show the photo with an uninterrupted Red Sea. Unless you want to claim that NASA broke into my house and swapped out the books with equally-worn copies…

This is a classic example of a phenomenon I see sometimes…a person with a nutty conspiracy theory latches onto the first thing they see, and if it happens to contain a bona fide error in it, there’s no convincing them of it; they will spin a huge unlikely story as to how “their” version of whatever it was is the correct one, and that the correct one is actually the fake used for a cover up.

Another example of this was a report early on in the Sandy Hook saga that described the wrong gun as being in someone’s trunk. Attempts to correct it were treated as part of the cover up. Interesting that people who would normally have no trouble believing a YSM jurinalist would fuck up especially when the subject was eeevil gunz, believed that this particular jurinalist at this particular time was infallible–because they wanted to believe Sandy Hook was a fake.

What’s going on in both cases is seizing on (apparent) evidence that one’s pet mistaken theory is true, and resisting any attempt to show that this particular piece of evidence, at least, is flawed–sometimes to the point of having to posit another incredibly elaborate or expensive effort to hide the “real” evidence. A mistake, a distorted jpeg, or something similar. This is actually a form of confirmation bias.

The Moons of Jupiter

Jupiter has 95 (yes, ninety five) known moons (as of 5 February 2024). When I was a kid, the number was twelve, though older books in the elementary school library would show eleven. Then a 13th moon was discovered when I was ten (1974), another one the following year, and then the Voyager spacecraft found three more…and at that point they decided they really ought to get on with naming them. The first five or so had been named for quite some time, it was the remaining six seven eight nine (dammit) twelve that hadn’t been officially named though there were several suggested lists. (The next discovery wasn’t until 2000; the remaining 78 moons have all been discovered since then). Today, of course the list has outstripped our ability to think of names and the newly discovered ones are given temporary designators like S2022 J 3, for 3rd Satellite of Jupiter discovered in 2022.

Astronomers love to categorize things. And the moons of Jupiter are no exception. There are nine categories and I will cover them almost in order of distance from the planet.

The Main Moons, or Galilean Moons, are Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, in order outwards from Jupiter. These are BIG. They are bigger than any dwarf planet (and that includes Pluto). Ganymede is bigger than Mercury and Callisto almost beats Mercury as well. All are spherical, as one would expect from bodies that size. The innermost orbits at 422 thousand kilometers (from the center of gravity of the Jovian system, essentially the same as the center of Jupiter), the outermost at 1,883 thousand kilometers. (For comparison, our Moon orbits at 384 thousand kilometers, so these are all further from Jupiter than our Moon is from us.) These were all discovered about 30 milliseconds after Galileo first pointed a telescope at Jupiter in 1610; you can see them in binoculars. They all orbit in nearly circular orbits (the key word, as we will see, is nearly), in planes within half a degree of Jupiter’s equatorial plane, all in a prograde (forward) direction. Forward, here, means counterclockwise as seen from way out in space, over the Sun’s north pole. Almost every large body in the solar system both orbits (either the sun or a planet) and rotates prograde, including Earth and the Moon.

Another group of four moons are called the “Inner Moons,” they all orbit within the orbit of Io. The first of these is the first moon to be discovered since Galileo, in 1892, and got named Amalthea. Amalthea is an irregular lump about 167 km across. Much smaller than the Galilean satellites and too small to force itself into a spherical shape. The other three are the ones discovered by the Voyager spacecraft in 1979/80, and are considerably smaller still. There’s also a lot of debris in that region, forming Jupiter’s rather tenuous ring system. Again, these are in nice and tidy, nearly circular orbits in Jupiter’s equatorial plane, all prograde.

Together these groups are called the “Regular Satellites” of Jupiter, which means the other 87 moons are all “Irregular Satellites.”

The Irregular Satellites all orbit much further away from Jupiter than Callisto (the outermost regular satellite). These in turn are divided into prograde and retrograde (orbiting backwards) groupings, each of those is divided again into actual groups. There is a naming convention, too. A prograde irregular moon will have a name ending in -a. A retrograde irregular moon will have a name ending in -e. Not withstanding this, a moon with a very high inclination will have a name ending in -o, whether or not it’s retrograde or prograde.

Prograde groups include Themisto…which is a group all unto itself. It’s the innermost of the irregular satellites averaging roughly 7.4 million km from Jupiter. It’s in a very elliptical orbit (0.340 on a scale from 0 [circular] to 0.9999… [skinniest ellipse possible]) at a 43.8 degree inclination, not at all tidy. It takes about 130 days to complete one orbit about Jupiter.

The next group is the Himalia group of nine satellites, named after its largest member, which is roughly 140 km across. They all orbit at about a 28 degree inclination with eccentricities ranging from 0.1 to 0.24. Average distance from Jupiter is 11.1 to 12.3 million kilometers, most of them being 11.4 or 11.7. They take about 260 days to orbit Jupiter. Four of these are big enough to be in the “classic” 14 satellites from before Voyager I and 2. These orbits are all quite similar to each other, hence the grouping together. It’s likely these were all part of a larger body at some time in the past.

The Carpo group, 2 satellites, are 16-17 million kilometers from Jupiter and are inclined at 50 degrees, which subjects them to all sorts of wacky perturbations resulting in cyclical changes to their orbits. Their eccentricities are very different from each other.

And then there is Valetudo, a group unto itself, in an eccentric orbit 17 million kilometers from Jupiter, at a lesser inclination than the Carpo group. It actually crosses the orbits of other groups’ satellites.

Now we get to the retrograde groups, three of them. The Ananke group ranges from 19-22 million kilometers from Jupiter and there are 26 of them. A quick eyeball scan of the list on Wikipedia shows inclinations from 145-152 degrees. (A retrograde orbit can also be thought of as going forward, but with an inclination of over 90 degrees so it’s “flipped over”, and this is how they get listed in tables of orbital elements.) Inclinations are mostly 0.20 to 0.23. It’s thought that these have a common origin, their orbits are just too similar for it to be pure chance.

The other two groups are the Carme and Pasiphae groups, with 30 and 18 members respectively. They overlap in terms of average distance from Jupiter, 22.6-24.2 million kilometers from Jupiter, taking as long as two Earth years to make one orbit. The Carme group inclinations are all about 164 degrees (i.e., 74 degrees but going around backwards), the Pasiphae groups are in a broader range centering on 150 degrees or so. In each case the satellites in each group are thought to have a common origin.

“Common origin” or “were once part of a larger body”, by the way, imply that there are more undiscovered fragments of what they used to be. The smallest size I see in the table is ~1 km, but conceivably there could be a lot of smaller and smaller pieces. 100 meters, boulder size, gravel size, sand grain size…at what point do you stop and say “this isn’t a moon any more”? It’s a serious question from me, actually. I’m sure that “real” astronomers have given it thought, but I don’t know if they ever actually came to a decision. It did, after all, take hundreds of years for them to define “planet” and they were only forced to do that when they found too many edge cases…a story for another time. (And here, they haven’t started finding really small items in Jovian orbit…when that happens they’ll have to decide where to draw the line if they haven’t already.)

So…broad patterns? Note that the retrograde satellites (by count, most of the satellites are in these groups) are all further out than any of the prograde ones. The retrogrades are almost always 2 km or less in size, though each group has one fairly large body in it, 35-60 km across, probably the “main” piece of whatever broke up to form the group. It’s thought that the retrograde groups resulted from captured asteroids.

There also seems to be a hard 24 million kilometer limit. I haven’t cranked numbers but I suspect that beyond this range the Sun’s gravitational pull is stronger than Jupiter’s, so it would tend to grab any satellite of Jupiter’s that happened to be in a larger orbit than this.

In any case, the retrogrades are basically debris, and even the irregular progrades are basically junk too. Except for the fact that they make good studies in orbital mechanics, they’re pretty uninteresting.

The interesting moons are the Galilean moons. And with that I submit my entry to the understatement of the year contest.

The Galilean Moons
(because who gives a rat’s ass about the other 91 moons?)

The Galilean moons are, in order outward from Jupiter, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. Jupiter plus these moons actually looks like a miniature solar system, and you’ll hear the term “Jovian system” used to refer to the ensemble as a whole.

Although Galileo is given credit for discovering these moons, they were also seen by Simon Marius, and he gave them their names; Galileo simply called them Jupiter I, Jupiter II, and so on, a system which continues to this day; now Roman numerals are given out to newly discovered moons in the order they are named.

“Io” is pronounced “EYO-oh.” Don’t be like the clueless science jurinalist who pronounced it “ten” when the Voyagers flew by. (In his defense, that was the era when Bo Derek was the Queen Hot Woman of All Time thanks to the movie 10…for a whole two months.)

Here is a picture showing relative sizes, Jupiter and the four Galileans, in order top to bottom. This is actually a composite, just to show relative sizes; you’d never see this exact thing all at once.

And another, a real-time shot of Jupiter and all four Galileans. Since some are closer than others, it’s not quite to scale; it is however a “real” snapshot of all five bodies at the same time. If you were to somehow have been able to stand there, this is what you’d have seen. Two of the moons are probably invisible; if so, right click and select “open image in new tab” and even there they will be just single-pixel dots, and one is barely more than a dot)

And now for some raw numbers, with our own Moon tossed in for comparison:

Name	Diameter (km)	Distance from Primary (km)	Orbital Period (days)	Orbital Period (compared to Io)	Density (water = 1)
Io	3660	421,800	1.769	1	3.528
Europa	3121.6	671,100	3.551	2	3.014
Ganymede	5268.2	1,070,400	7.155	4	1.942
Callisto	4820.6	1,882,700	16.689	9.4	1.834
Moon	3474.8	384,399	27.3	irrelevant	3.344

Note that Ganymede is by far the largest; it’s even larger than the planet Mercury.

But also note something else: In the time it takes Ganymede to orbit Jupiter once, Europa will orbit exactly twice, and Io will orbit exactly four times. This is known as an orbital resonance. However, they won’t line up all at once. Io will lap Europa on one side of Jupiter, and then on the other side of Jupiter, Europa will lap Ganymede. See the animation below, where the inner moons will lap “above” Jupiter, and Europa and Ganumede will lap “below” Jupiter.

That’s a simulation, what’s below is based on actual data (notice the time stamp):

This turns out to be important.

Another thing to note is the average densities. Io and Europa (and our Moon) all have densities a bit above 3.0 that of water. We know our own moon is a big ball of rock with very little nickel-iron in its core. And your average generic rock has about that density (though there are plenty of kinds of minerals that come in far higher, such as for instance native gold, a/k/a gold nuggets). So this isn’t unreasonable for moons of Jupiter. However Ganymede and Callisto are considerably less dense, an indication that they are largely ice.

Jupiter I: Io

Io has a very unusual appearance, it almost looks like a pizza. As it happens, it is the most volcanically active body in the solar system. If you don’t like its looks, come back an a few centuries; the entire surface will have been replaced. That’s how volcanic it is. it even has mountains taller than Everest!

This is a pair of pictures of Tvashtar Paterae, taken in November 1999 and February 2000, and yes, that’s lava in the right hand frame.

Volcanism requires heat. And if you’ll recall, Mars…a considerably larger body…does not have volcanism any more (in spite of the largest known volcano being there). Mars has cooled off too much. Why hasn’t Io cooled off?

The answer is (wait for it) tidal forces. (I warned you before I started the tour of the solar system that tidal forces would show up when you least expect them…I did warn you.) Io is in a slightly elliptical orbit (very slightly but still, not quite perfectly circular) and that means it slows down and speeds up in different parts of its orbit, while its rotation (tidally locked to Jupiter) is at a constant rate. This causes Io to stretch and compress, which generates the heat, which causes the insane amounts of volcanism. The surface coloration is largely sulfur. Io’s eruptions have been captured on camera by Voyager, the Galileo orbiter, and Juno.

Some of the stuff that gets erupted ends up in orbit around Io, as very small particles perhaps even single atoms, and some of that gets heated and escapes into orbit around Jupiter. At some point much of this stuff gets ionized. As a result there’s a “neutral cloud” near Io, and a donut or torus of ionized matter roughly where Io orbits. Since this stuff is charged and moving, it actually contributes to Jupiter’s magnetic field…perhaps as much as 50 percent of the total.

This picture not only shows the torus of ionized Io-stuff in red and the neutral cloud in yellow, it shows a third feature in green, the flux tube, which connects Io to Jupiter’s polar regions and can cause aurora-like displays in Jupiter’s atmosphere. But Io itself can have interesting displays, visible when it is in Jupiter’s shadow:

(From the caption on Wikipoo: Auroral glows in Io’s upper atmosphere. Different colors represent emission from different components of the atmosphere (green comes from emitting sodium, red from emitting oxygen, and blue from emitting volcanic gases like sulfur dioxide). Image taken while Io was in eclipse.)

Another source of tidal forces is the pull of Europa and Callisto, with the resonances enhancing the effect.

This was a total surprise when it was discovered back around 1980. And since then it has become clear to planetary scientists that in many cases the moons of the outer planets can be more interesting than the planets themselves.

Jupiter II: Europa

Most especially the second Galilean moon, Europa. What we see when we look at Europa is a solid sheet of ice; it’s the smoothest body in the solar system, and appears to have a 100km thick layer of water above the typical rocky interior. What makes it interesting, though, is that that 100km layer is almost certainly not frozen solid. It’s probably tens of kilometers of ice, sure, but above a world-wide ocean of liquid water, a lot of it, probably more than we have on Earth. (So aliens coming here to steal our water [which is ridiculous because water is almost certainly the most common compound in the universe] would be better off going to Europa.)

(From Wikipoo caption: Closeup views of Europa obtained on 26 September 1998; images clockwise from upper left show locations from north to south as indicated at lower left.)

That water is likely heated by volcanic activity too, for the same reason as Io…but less so. Tidal forces are much lower here. However, the forces will often crack the ice layer, and liquid water will rise under the pressure, with the breaks freezing over, which results in the darker lines. These areas might offer better access to the water, which we want because…

Water is the one thing all life (that we know of!) needs. Not oxygen, but water! This makes Europa a prime candidate for extraterrestrial life, especially since we know that on Earth, “smokers” on the ocean floor host entire ecosystems, and such “smokers” are almost certainly present on Io.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, staying in his lane academically, has said he wants to go ice fishing on Io. He’s not alone in this.

On the 10th of this month, we will launch the Europa Clipper, a spacecraft that will orbit Jupiter, but do so in a way that maximizes the time it will spend on Europa flybys. It’s the largest interplanetary spacecraft developed by NASA. Since it is so big, the booster needs help; it will do gravity boosts off Earth and Mars before arriving at Jupiter in April 2030. This is just a preliminary for a Europa Lander, still on the drawing board.

We’re going after Europa with gusto!

Jupiter III: Ganymede

Ganymede is also covered in ice, with a likely liquid ocean 200km down. It’s colder and harder to get to, so it’s not as tantalizing as Europa. It’s not completely geologically dead: it apparently has at least some liquid iron in its core since it actually possesses a magnetosphere (so far the only moon known to do so). It’s the largest moon in the solar system. As I’ve noted before, it’s actually larger than the planet Mercury, but only 45 percent as massive since so much of it is ice, and because Mercury has a very large iron core for its size. The surface area is in fact over half as much as all of the land on Earth. Unfortunately, it’s mostly ice–and not just a covering, but a full crustal layer of it–and blasted by radiation from Jupiter’s magnetosphere, so it turns out not to be a good place for a realtor to hang a “for sale” sign.

This is Tros crater. In mythology, Tros was Ganymede’s father, and Ganymede himself was Jupiter’s cupbearer (and likely homosexual lover)

Ganymede also has the distinction of being the largest body in the solar system with no significant atmosphere.

Jupiter IV: Callisto

Callisto is a bit smaller than Ganymede, and is the third largest moon in the solar system. (#2 is Titan, a moon of Saturn. And our moon is at #5, just ahead of Europa.) Callisto is remarkable for being very heavily cratered, an indication that its surface has not eroded much or been “worked over” by processes on Callisto itself. It’s far enough out from Jupiter to have very little effect from tidal forces, and it’s not in any sort of resonance with the other moons. Callisto, in fact, has an impact basin named Valhalla, which is 3800 kilometers across!

Callisto may, in fact, be an even mixture of rock and ice, not even having differentiated much with the heavy stuff going down to the core when it formed.

Of the four, Callisto is of least interest for finding life, but it is of great interest for perhaps preserving it. It’s far enough away from Jupiter’s magnetic field and radiation belts that it could perhaps be useful for a manned base from which we could explore the rest of the Jovian system.

(From Wikipoo: Voyager 1 image of Valhalla, a multi-ring impact structure 3,800 km in diameter)

So that is a summary of the Moons of Jupiter, all of which rank among the most interesting bodies in our solar system. Were they not in orbit about Jupiter, they’d all be planets in their own right.

As a bonus I will conclude with this diagram, which shows many of the moons in the Solar System, with Pluto and Earth thrown in for good measure. Any moon large enough to force itself into a spherical shape is shown here.

(Oh, and note the Red Sea glitch doesn’t appear on this copy of the Blue Marble photo.)