As a ‘space-junkie’, I’m always fascinated by interesting stuff we continue to discover from space exploration and space-augmented astronomy and astrophysics. I hope we don’t waste this capability to feed Bush’s ego-driven demand to put people on Mars without providing the money to pay for it.
==============
Current theories about the causes of Iapetus’ weird shape:

<http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20070723/sc_space/walnutshapedmoonsmysterysolved;_ylt=AtCR3fko1DPF6kasRK2GwTtxieAA>;

"You would expect a very fast-spinning moon to have this bulge but not a slow-spinning moon, because the bulge would have been much flatter," said Dennis Matson, another Cassini project scientist at JPL. However, Mason said, "we've modeled how Iapetus formed its big, spin-generated bulge and why its rotation slowed down to its present, nearly 80-day period."
[Details of the model are in the upcoming edition of the online journal Iapetus]