This Week’s Where In The Universe Challenge

Are you ready for another Where In The Universe Challenge? Take a look at the image above and see if you can name where in the Universe this image is from. Give yourself extra points if you can name the spacecraft responsible for the image. We’ll provide the image today, but won’t reveal the answer until tomorrow. This gives you a chance to mull over the image and provide your answer/guess in the comment section — if you dare! Check back tomorrow on this same post to see how you did. Good luck!

UPDATE (12/4): The answer has now been posted below. If you haven’t made your guess yet, no peeking before you do!!

A variety of guesses this week, but many answers were correct: Saturn’s moon Iapetus. The Cassini spacraft zoomed in on the cratered moon to provide this stunning close-up. And did you know you can golf the moons of Saturn? The Cassini scientists created a Flash-based game based on some of the best images from the spacecraft’s tour of Saturn and its moons. It’s called Golf Sector 6, and its pretty fun. As many of you mentioned, this image shows the equatorial bulge of Iapetus, with mountainous terrain reaching about 10 km in height. Above the middle of the image can be seen a place where an impact has exposed the bright ice beneath the dark overlying material.

The image was taken on 10 September 2007 with the Cassini’s narrow-angle camera at a distance of approximately 3870 km from Iapetus. Image scale is 23 m per pixel. Credits: NASA/ JPL/ Space Science Institute.

And you know-it-alls out there don’t have to provide links to images or videos in your guesses! Give everyone the equal chance to play, please!

Tune in again next week for another WITU challenge!