NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Looking like claw marks from some giant space bird, peculiar parallel tracks on Saturn’s moons Dione and Rhea have researchers baffled.
“I feel like I’m going crazy trying to come up with an explanation,” says Emily Martin, a planetary scientist at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C., who presented her team’s work at a meeting of the 2017 American Geophysical Union in New Orleans, Louisiana, on 11 December.
Previous observers have spotted a few of these streaks before but none had ever systematically charted them. While using data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft to map fractured terrain on the two moons, Martin’s intern kept running into the lengthy features, which couldn’t be chalked up to known processes that alter the surfaces of moons.
Their brightness and the fact that they lay atop other