Is the Titan´s Cassini images already better than Hubble?

[danielj]

There was an imprecison if Cassini?s images of Titan would be better than Hubble because of Titan?s atmosphere transparency.I saw the last images of the moon and I think that it shows Titan better than Hubble.Or was just my impression?Could I be possible wrong about?
Another question : why Phoebe images are almost all in black and white(actually almost all Cassini images)

[selden]

Daniel,

All Cassini pictures are black-and-white.

Cassini's color pictures are created by taking several black-and-white pictures through different colored filters and then combining them.

I'm sure they took some filtered pictures during the flyby of Phoebe. Because of the rapid change in the distance to Phoebe during the flyby, however, the pictures of Phoebe are all a different size and at a different angle. A lot of computer work will be needed to align them properly so they can be combined.

I don't know if Cassini is close enough to Titan yet for its tiny telescope to do a better job than Hubble.

[Evil Dr Ganymede]

They're definitely better than Hubble's already.

Check this out:
http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/view.php?id=202&www=4b9e1d81c1f4dc52a46d6bb1cf505179



Those dark bits look a bit tantalising... could they be ethane seas? swamps of organic sludge? Or just dark terrain features?

[Rassilon]

I cant wait to get my hands on a projection map of titan if there will ever be a detailed one completely real and not phantasy....Titan is by far my favorite place in the solar system!

[HankR]

The Hubble images of Titan's surface are not the best ones currently available; images recently obtained by an international team using ESO's VLT (Very Large Telescope) are significantly better:

http://www.eso.org/outreach/press-rel/pr-2004/pr-09-04.html

The latest Cassini image is even better, showing quite clearly the "Lying H" feature originally identified in the VLT images. And the images from Cassini's first close approach to Titan next week should be utterly fantastic!

- Hank

[Evil Dr Ganymede]

Yeah, well it's interesting that the Titan images that have been released so far on the Cassini website were taken a month ago (May). It must have taken higher resolution images by now, and as you point out around the 2nd July it's going to get as close as 300,000km or so to Titan.

So hopefully we'll be seeing some rather awesome high resolution images and other data of Titan's surface released very soon.

[HankR]

I've been very disappointed with the Cassini project's sluggish release of images thus far. I can remember watching Voyager images being released in real time as they came down from the spacecraft, and it really gave you a sense of participation in the exploration. That wasn't possible with Galileo because of the antenna failure, but I had hoped that Cassini would do better. (MER has generally been pretty good about making raw image available quickly, although their written mission updates are frequently quite out-of-date.) I think it's fine for the press office to make selected images with captions available to the media at a leisurely pace. But the project ought to make the raw images available for those who want to see them as quickly as possible.

- Hank

[Evil Dr Ganymede]

Ideally, they would. But they don't release all the data as it comes in because of data embargoes (in fact, I don't even think they did that with Voyager - they did press releases of select images as they came in) that allow the scientists involved in the mission to get their papers out first. And certainly in the UK at least, the double whammy of initially incomprehensible images of Halley from Giotto and "boring" Uranus pictures from the 1986 flyby put people off doing live TV coverage of such events.

An image a day is fine by me. Speaking of which, they released an utterly awesome animated GIF of a full rotation of Titan as seen through the near IR filter, and there are some VERY interesting features there. Can't wait til next week!!!!

http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/

[Matt McIrvin]

That animated rotation GIF clearly shows that the named features in the ESO map are all real. Most of the features in the Hubble maps were probably noise, except for the bright Xanadu region east of the Dragon's Head and west of the Lying H.

The dark marks, whatever they are, are certainly picturesque. (I'd vote to call them "Winston", "Niles", "Rumfoord", and "the Kazak Pools" (for the dog-shaped one?) but I don't suppose those will stick.)