Friday, November 18, 2022

"But then in the middle you have Tethys which has a density of less than one, [less dense than water.]"-Sierra Ferguson


Couple things. First, why do some people insist Mimas is the Death Star Moon when Tethys also has the mojo and might be hollowed, and second, why isn't Iapetus included in this video. I imagine the second question will get answered. 

This video is about a discrepancy. Saturn's mid-size moons don't line up in a nice clean manner. They are rambunctiously sorted not according to size or density, nor crater population. If one could figure out why, they would discover a tool to use in the modeling of the early solar system. Also it would be awesome by itself.

  • 5:35, "The Pluto Charon system," is the correct way to refer to it in my opinion, and I'll fight over it. It ain't a planet, give it up. But it is a binary, and that's neat.
  • At 18:20 the crater counting begins. Note that she is looking for patches of craters with about the same wear, not crater counting the whole world. 
  • 25:05, "Rose" diagrams. They show directional data in a circle. Think like a pilot picking which way to point the nose of an aircraft in 3D. Needless to say these diagrams come up in planetary science but only for a few things like impactor vectors here, or stuff like shadows; maybe seismology.
  • Conclusions at 50:00
Our speaker is young, nervous, and apparently had the hiccups or was pizza/beer lunch burpy. I've never seen her before, and hope to again, but she complicates her talk, torn between wanting to display the shiny new words she's been learning and talk like a paper, vs trying to get press through it smoothly. But she brought great slides so just pause it periodically, the points she's sloppy with are usually in the slides.

Her overall work is not done. This to her is updating her overseers that she is making progress and finding good science. She has some wonky crater stuff and is working it to constrain a relative dating range, but she hasn't got that far yet. Even the relative dating between Hershel and Odysseys and their backgrounds isn't in here. But that's because she's the one doing it, and it's underway right now. This LPI is only a few days old. 

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