Huygens!

[Dollan]

In a complete guess, that image looks almost as if there is seepage coming from a lake, or even smooth ice field.

[rthorvald]

Here I colorized the "liquid" areas in blue and the land yellowish. This enhances conspicuously the 'canal' network

Great. Now, it *is* canals on Titan. We??ll never hear the end of it... Books will be written by tabloid mysticists, based on that one
I predict that, three months from now, Amazon will have a dozen titles about the Atlantean Canal Builders From Titan!

Well, back to TV. By some unfathomable reason norwegian television has live coverage. It??s the sign of the end times, when they show anything else than football.
Thank you for the images, btw. I have searched everywhere for pictures...

-rthorvald

[The Singing Badger]

The images from the Arizona website are very smoggy and most are just blur, but there are a couple of cool ones; some nice perspective shots of low mountainous landscapes, and some foggy but interesting shots of the drainage channels.

[t00fri]

These I just show for a short while, since there is some severe legal blurb...

Here should be some nice images that I am unfortunately not allowed to show.

[danielj]

Based in this image,we can say for sure there is SOME light reaching Titan??s surface?And so the atmosphere is at least,have a little transparency?

First surface photo...

[Dollan]

Am I seeing some kind of texture in those smooth dark areas? Or is it an imaging artifact? or am I seeing things?

[t00fri]

Indeed, I am as always ready to bet (he he Grant) that the sun may be located as some diffuse halo through the haze from the surface...

Bye Fridger

[wcomer]

The texture is an artifact. From the triplets it looks like there are three cameras. One facing the horizon, one facing straight down and the other somewhere between the two. The texture you see shows up on previous and subsequent triplets. I suspect it is due to liquid or frost on the lens. Some of the texture may not be artifacts, we will not know until the raw images have been processed further.

[Tetzauh]

Well Definetly light reacher the surface of titan, the question is What wavelenght?

Titan's surface is supposed to be 1000 dimmer than earth's. I just cheched ESA's Homepage http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/index.html and the images are B/W. Has anybody been coloring these ones?

[Dollan]

Image artifacts, eh? So the possibility of some sort of liquid being present is still valid... for now. Nice.

[wcomer]

Well, the ESA site is reffering to those stones as "ice blocks". They are also using the language of "shoreline" and "drainage channels". So yes, I think liquids are a possibility.

[Tetzauh]

Image artifacts, eh? So the possibility of some sort of liquid being present is still valid... for now. Nice.

Possibility? To phra?prase the NASA guys "If thta's not liquid, I don't know what it is"!

[Dollan]

I'm not surprised that they think they are ice blocks. At those temperatures, isn't water ice at least supposed to be as hard as granite?

[The Singing Badger]

Webcast is back up.

Do we yet know whether Huygens landed on the dark stuff or the light stuff?

[stonedyak]

Does anyone know if these first images are the maximum resolution we can expect? What was the resoultion of the cameras on board?

Not that these pictures aren't absolutely fantastic! But I guess I'm just a little spoilt from all the Mars rover pictures we've had over the last year

[Dollan]

I notice that the Cassini site itself has been down. Overwhelmed by the sheer number of web-hits, perhaps?

[Guest]

I'm slightly pleased! On 10 Nov 2004 (http://www.celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6031&start=75), I was so bold as to wildly speculate this interpretation of the second SAR image publically released (the one that got colourised...):

The one that's multi-coloured is great. It's full of river valleys, and there are three canyons in the dark patch. ...

Well, well! Look at all those drainage channels in the first released Huygens descent image! (smug smug) .

Meanwhile, following wcomer's tip, I've found that the centre picture of the triplet at http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/%7Ekholso/jpeg/triplet.541.jpg provides a wider context to that first release Huygens descent image, a larger, longer river lies further away from the smooth, dark area. Have a look!

Here I colorized the "liquid" areas in blue ...

Ah Fridger, but are those channels filled with liquid? I made a comment on 04 Jul 2004 (http://www.celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5319) that Titan might have recently turned into a cryogenic equivalent of a dry, desert world. I think that dark area to the right is not liquid, but a dried out lake bed, and it'll have dunes in it. Maybe it hardly rains on Titan these days - too few clouds, just high haze. Also, not only is there light at Titan surface, but rocks and valleys cast directional shadows - and that means: you can tell where the sun is in the sky! Well, early days for speculations yet Fridger, but if you look at the centre picture of this triplet (http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/%7Ekholso/jpeg/triplet.436.jpg), that's a strikingly straight line... Artificial? Built by your Titanian Potato-oid race that is now surrounding the recently landed Huygens probe? .

Am I seeing some kind of texture in those smooth dark areas? Or is it an imaging artifact?

I think it's a very close up view of some rock/ice underneath Huygens after it landed. By the way, Dollan, cool avatar! .

Who sees 'droplets' on these pictures?

Do we yet know whether Huygens landed on the dark stuff or the light stuff?

If I may, I'd guess the probe landed on the 'dark stuff': the horizon is flat, the picture shows a rock-strewn plain and I think that's what the dark areas are. Maybe Titan is very Mars-like, by the looks of it.

OK, now back to being serious for me...

Spiff.

[t00fri]

Spiff,

you might not have noticed that the Arizona guys took away all their raw images a short while ago

I showed a few (colorized ones here) here and took them away again to satisfy their legal blurb...

I agree there is no evidence yet that there is actually liquid. There might have been liquid long long ago...

I know that you previously agreed with me (and disagreed with Grant) that the Sun should be discernible...

Bye Fridger

[Guest]

Actually, that picture Dollan posted above is stated by ESA to be "This is one of the first raw images returned by the ESA Huygens probe during its successful descent. It was taken at an altitude of 8 kilometres with a resolution of 20 metres per pixel. It shows what could be the landing site, with shorelines and boundaries between raised ground and flooded plains."

I can't make it out as that, instead maybe as a series of mountain ranges, but then the shadows are all wrong - or are they lakes, and I'm wrong!? .

Yes, I just found out the http://www.lpl.arizona.edu raw data pics got pulled...

Spiff.

[Evil Dr Ganymede]

I think they've really jumped the gun on their interpretations - there is no evidence to suggest that those are "river valleys", "drainage channels", or "shorelines".

The low resolution image at
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huy ... Y3E_0.html

to me very clearly looks like it's showing (cryovolcanic) flows. Those are lobate boundaries in the bright terrain, you can see them arcing back on themselves, and you can see each lobe is overlapping one below it - especially in the left of the image. They certainly do NOT look like rivers or drainage channels - they do however look VERY reminiscent of lava flow boundaries that we've seen on mars, the moon, and on Io.

The "shoreline" looks to me like it's a strike-slip fault boundary - the long block of bright terrain sticking out from the top edge of the image looks like it's been displaced northwards along the line.

But as yet, I've seen no evidence of any liquid on the surface of Titan in any of the images we've got back from Cassini or Huygens so far. I think people are being blinded by wishful thinking here.