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The Discovery crew
The seven astronauts to fly the return to flight space shuttle mission hold a news conference at the Kennedy Space Center runway Jan. 7 to talk about delivery of the external tank, tile/RCC repair options and other issues. (44min 24sec file)

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Shuttle news conference
Senior space shuttle program officials hold a news conference at Kennedy Space Center on Jan. 6 following delivery of the redesigned external fuel tank to be used on the return-to-flight launch. (51min 47sec file)

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External tank arrives
The external tank for space shuttle Discovery's return-to-flight launch arrives at Kennedy Space Center. The tank is offloaded from the barge and moved into the Vehicle Assembly Building. (3min 15sec file)
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Tank leaves New Orleans
The redesigned external fuel tank to be used on the return-to-flight space shuttle launch is rolled out of the Michoud Assembly Facility and place on a barge for shipment from New Orleans to Kennedy Space Center. (1min 29sec file)
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Final touches
Technicians put the final touches on the Lockheed Martin-built space shuttle external fuel tank in advance of its shipment to the Cape. (1min 44sec file)
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Mars rover cake
NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe is presented with a commemorative birthday cake marking the one-year anniversary of the Mars rover Spirit's landing. (1min 21sec file)
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Rover news briefing
On the one-year anniversary of Spirit's landing on Mars, mission officials hold a status news conference on the twin exploration rovers to discuss the latest findings and future plans for the craft. (31min 20sec file)
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NASA chief speech
During celebrations marking the Mars rover milestone on Jan. 3, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe gave this speech at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. (10min 20sec file)
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The Mars rover story
Storyteller Syd Lieberman presents "Twelve Wheels on Mars" that describes the adventure to build, launch and explore with the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. (54min 57sec file)
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Iapetus: A view from the top
CASSINI PHOTO RELEASE
Posted: January 9, 2004

This oblique view of Saturn's moon Iapetus from high latitude shows how the dark, heavily cratered terrain of Cassini Regio transitions to a bright, icy terrain at high latitudes.


Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Download larger image version here

 
In this mosaic of two high resolution images taken during Cassini's New Year's Eve 2004 flyby of Iapetus, the direction toward the north pole is approximately 15 degrees below the horizontal on the right. At the equator terrains are uniformly covered with a dark mantle of material that has a reflectivity of about 4 percent. At latitudes toward the pole of about 40 degrees, the dark deposits become patchy and diffuse as the surface transitions to a much brighter, icy terrain near the pole. The brightest icy materials exhibit visual reflectivity over 60 percent.

Superimposed on the bright terrain is a subtle, ghostly pattern of crudely parallel, north-south trending wispy streaks. The streaks, which were discovered during this flyby of Iapetus, are typically a few kilometers wide and sometimes tens of kilometers long. Their appearance and orientation may be connected with the emplacement of dark materials that cover Cassini Regio. The dark materials might represent the gradual accumulation of dark debris falling from space, or alternatively, may represent fallout from plume-style eruptions that may have accompanied the formation of Iapetus's enigmatic equatorial ridge.

Also seen in this mosaic are conspicuous, north-facing bright crater walls. An example can be seen in the upper left where the bright, 4-kilometer-high (2.5 miles) walls of a 70 kilometer (44 mile) central-peak crater lies.

The bright crater walls are often higher in brightness than the corresponding south-facing walls of the same crater. They are vaguely reminiscent of bright north-facing crater walls that were discovered by NASA's Voyager and Galileo spacecraft in craters near the poles of the Jovian satellites Callisto and Ganymede. In the case of the Jovian satellites, cold-trapping of frosts on north-facing slopes and sublimation of ices from south-facing slopes are thought to produce the north-south asymmetries in crater wall brightness. However, the occurrence of some young-appearing craters on Iapetus that have bright north-facing and dark south-facing slopes, and the pattern of streaks near the north pole of Iapetus suggests that another mechanism may be responsible for the crater wall brightness asymmetries on Iapetus.

One possibility is that the south-facing slopes may be stained by the same process that emplaced the low brightness coating throughout the region. In this case, the north-pointing scarps might be bright because they face away and are shielded from the putative falling spray of dark materials. Bright south-facing slopes would exist primarily on young craters that have not been exposed to the darkening agent long enough to be stained.

The image was obtained in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on Dec. 31, 2004, at a distance of about 123,370 kilometers (76,658 miles) from Iapetus and at a Sun-Iapetus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 93 degrees. Resolution achieved in the original image was 732 meters (2,401 feet) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.