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Although the watches come in two sizes – medium and small – the colour you get is random.( ; 0870 241 1066). In Arthur C Clarke’s novel, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Saturn’s moon Iapetus plays a central role. It is the site of the star gate, the portal through which Dave Bowman – Clarke’s modern-day Odysseus – journeys to meet his destiny in a far-flung corner of the universe. Clarke selected Iapetus for the star gate because, uniquely among bodies in the solar system, it has one face about 10 times brighter than the other.
What better place to locate an artificial alien artefact than on a moon which gives every impression of being artificial itself?
The origin of Iapetus’s Janus faces is one of the longest standing mysteries in the solar system, one that has persisted since the moon’s discovery by the astronomer Giovanni Cassini in 1671 But the mystery may at last have been solved. The key turns out not to be an ancient encounter with an enigmatic extraterrestrial race but an ancient encounter with Saturn’s spectacular system of rings.
The most important event in unravelling the mystery of Iapetus was the flyby of the moon by the Cassini space probe on 31 December 2004. The onboard cameras captured images of the crater-strewn moon in unprecedented detail. What those images revealed stunned planetary scientists back on Earth.Stretching for 1,300km – almost a third of the way around the moon – was an extraordinary ridge. In places, it is 20km high – more than twice the height of Everest – and this is on a moon only 1,436km across, much less than half the diameter of our own Moon The ridge follows the equator closely. And there is nothing like it anywhere else in the solar system.At first sight, the existence of the ridge appears to be a second major puzzle to add to the outstanding mystery of Iapetus’s two-tone colouring. But, earlier this year, an American planetary scientist made a remarkable claim.
Carolyn Porco, head of the Cassini imagining team, suggested that the two features are linked. The evidence for this is the fact that the dark region of Iapetus, Cassini Regio, is perfectly bisected by the giant ridge.But how could the two features possibly be related? This is where Saturn’s rings come in. According to the astronomer Paulo Freire, of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, at some time past, Iapetus wandered too close to Saturn’s ring system. Saturn’s rings – themselves believed to be the relic of one or more disintegrated moons – are barely 100m thick but crammed with pieces of tumbling rock and ice, ranging in size from dust grains to office blocks. When Iapetus ran into the outer edge of the rings it would have come under a bombardment of unimaginable ferocity along the line where the rings intercepted the moon. “Millions of craters would have been created each and every second,” says Freire.But it isn’t the craters themselves that are important. It is the sheer volume of ring material that a collision like this can deposit in a relatively short time on the surface of a moon like Iapetus.