From Sky and Telescope:

http://skyandtelescope.com/news/article_1386_1.asp

Strangley they say they have no evidence at all for liquid on the surface, which seems to contradict what was said at the radar results press briefing.

Images of the medium-sized moon Iapetus taken from more than 100,000 kilometers away show several white peaks poking high above dark terrain on the moon's leading hemisphere. Preliminary analysis by Tillman Denk (Freie University, Germany) and colleagues suggests some of these peaks might be 10 to 20 kilometers high, which would rival or perhaps even exceed Mars's giant volcano Olympus Mons for being the highest mountains in the solar system. Scientists will have to wait until the September 2007 close Iapetus flyby to nail down the altitudes.

They must be referring to this image:

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/imag...eiImageID=24301

Iapetus is certainly turning into a curious beast. Multiple very large basins, central peaks upwards of 10 km tall, a very non-spherical profile, not to mention the hemispherical albedo asymmetry.

Iapetus must be a challenge to photograph due to the extreme light and dark areas. Do you all think you've found the optimum filters to photograph it?

Those white mountains in the middle of Iapetus' dark hemisphere are very strong evidence that the dark stuff has NOT been sprinkled down onto Iapetus' leading side at a gentle, uniform rate over the eons after being blasted off Phoebe or the other litttle irregular moons by meteor impacts. If it was, their slopes, no matter how steep, would surely have a significant coating of the stuff too. (The white areas are surely several dozen km across, so even if the mountains are 11 km high their slopes are not all that steep and dark material would not have a trong tendency to wlide down it.)

Two other very interesting items in that Sky & Telescope report from the DPS meeting that were not in the meeting's adavance abstracts:

(1) "The diminutive moon Pan, which carves the Encke Division, follows an eccentric orbit. Gravitational perturbations from Pan cause strange scalloped features in the A ring. By analyzing these undulations, Porco refined Pan's mass. Images suggest a diameter of about 25 kilometers, which allowed her to calculate the moon's mean density: about 0.5 gram per cubic centimeter. This value is similar to the densities of small, inner moons such as Janus and Epimetheus. Observations of Atlas and its perturbations on the rings also suggest a density of about 0.5. These low densities suggest porous bodies that are possibly rubble piles rather than solid water ice." (The report also repeats the statement in one abstract that similar warping on the edge of the Keeler Gap strongly suggests that it, like the Encke Gap, is formed by a internal moonlet.)

(2) "Images and radar data have failed to turn up obvious impact craters on Titan. This could indicate that the surface is young. A radar map from the October 26th flyby shows a 100-kilometer-wide circular feature that appears raised, so it is probably not an impact crater. Instead, it appears similar to Venus's 'pancake domes.' If this interpretation is correct, the feature was probably formed by upwelling water- or ammonia-rich ices (known as cryovolcanism)."

Wasn't sure where to post, but this spot seemed a likely candidate.

There's a new CHARM presentation posted at the Cassini website.

It deals with the CDA results.

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/products/pdfs/?M=A

Bart