Ski Enceladus
Check out the Moguls!
Back in my grad school days my officemates and I decided to take up skiing as a respite from the heavy workload and stress of first-year studies. We formed what became known as the “Klingon Ski Team” and our charge was to “ski with honor!” The University of Colorado was within an hour or two’s drive of several decent ski areas, and so we skiied with honor as best we could, hardly missing a weekend except during the December holidays, when the slopes were packed with tourists.
Cairo Sulcus on Enceladus, taken by Cassini's narrow-angle camera. Image size is 1024 x 1024; scale is 10 meters per pixel.
I was reminded of those heady days of Klingon sitzmarks and fearless mogul-jumping when I saw this image of the surface of Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus in the Boston Globe’s “Big Picture” section yesterday.
These ridges and folds are actually wrinkles in the icy crust and some of those chunks of ice are a couple of hundred meters across. This place would provide some incredible ski runs, if you could figure out a way to get there and get the appropriate ski gear (including oxygen tanks and life-support suits) and find a chopper to drop you for some extreme outer solar system skiing. Klingons would do it!
