Celestia Forums

It is well worth reading the Titan flyby mission description (Feb 15) on the NASA/Cassini site! They plan plenty of systematic imaging of Titan's surface both in various wavelength bands and with RADAR.

Bye Fridger

Also sounds like it might be touch-and-go whether they'll get any decent imaging of Enceladus afterwards - the Titan flyby is targeted (ie Cassini was aimed at Titan with thrusters), the Enceladus one isn't (it just happens to go close past it after the Titan flyby, and aiming may be a bit off because they're not sure of the effect of drag of titan's upper atmosphere).

Full details can be found here

4km... 1km... 700m... sounds like we'll have all we need to make a virtual texture

Here's the equivalent graphic for the Enceladus flyby.
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/i ... ageID=1361

We could get down to 70 m/pxl! Though to be honest, the lower resolutions are more useful, we're gonna need context here!

Here's a pic of Titan taken on Feb 12th, we're starting to see features...
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/i ... geID=31850

I suspect the VIMS instrument will be more useful here again though, that seemed to be able to penetrate the haze...

Applying quite a bit of 'magick' to the Cassini Raw image N00027951.jpg, including despeckling, destriping, sequences of unsharp masking/gaussian blurs and finally (false) coloration, gives this pretty view from Feb 14/15



and then this close-up (Cassini Raw image N00027998.jpg):


For a better orientation, I have (roughly) marked the image locations as overlays on the earlier large scale image:



Note that the two (colorized) new images above are reduced by a factor of 2 in size, compared to the originals!
Bye Fridger

Today, the flyby 3 image #2 and another Raw image, N00027948 came on display at Cyclops. They both look promising. Image #2 will substantially help to improve my Titan texture. It focusses around the bright Xanadu region with the Huygens landing site invisible beyond the horizon in the top-left area. After considerable image 'magick' a highly reduced size of that image is shown below (top image). A fairly hires detail image, substantially processed by me and reduced in size, is shown at the bottom.



Bye Fridger

New radar images from Titan show, among other things, a giant crater.

I've played a bit with some of the new raw Titan images and came up with this:



Although the colours are wrong and it's not really meant to be that factual, it does bring out the hazy atmosphere (dark red) the large shiny or overexposed part to the lower left, and the darker patches to the upper right.

Michael Kilderry

andersa wrote:New radar images from Titan show, among other things, a giant crater.

The crater kinda reminds me of the Mead impact basin on Venus...

The "Cat Scratches" image is very interesting to me though. The morphology of those linear features looks vaguely like the so-called "grooved terrain" on Ganymede, but is it me or does it look like it's partially buried by the bright stuff around it?

andersa wrote:New radar images from Titan show, among other things, a giant crater.

How does the giant crater frequency at Saturn compare with the situation at Jupiter? From what I've gathered it seems that practically every major moon of Saturn has such a crater, whereas the only giant craters I've heard of in the Jupiter system are Valhalla and Asgard on Callisto.

If it is the case that Saturn has more of these craters, is there a possibility that the formation of the giant craters on the moons could be linked to the formation of the ring system - if a large body broke up inside the Roche limit, surely some large fragments would get kicked around the Saturn system, leading to the potential for lots of giant impacts.

chaos syndrome wrote:How does the giant crater frequency at Saturn compare with the situation at Jupiter? From what I've gathered it seems that practically every major moon of Saturn has such a crater, whereas the only giant craters I've heard of in the Jupiter system are Valhalla and Asgard on Callisto.

Well, both Io and Europa are geologically active so any evidence of giant crater has been wiped away. Ganymede has some evidence of internal geological processes, and Callisto, which doesn't, has those large craters. Except for Titan and Enceladus, Saturn's moons are geologially inactive. Also, beside Titan, they are also much smaller than Galilean satellites so any big crater look relatively larger (especially Mimas' Herschell, which is not really that huge).

chaos syndrome wrote:If it is the case that Saturn has more of these craters, is there a possibility that the formation of the giant craters on the moons could be linked to the formation of the ring system - if a large body broke up inside the Roche limit, surely some large fragments would get kicked around the Saturn system, leading to the potential for lots of giant impacts.

I believe that giant craters there are just remnants from the bombardment era. On the other hand it is possible and perhaps even likely that Saturn's rings are result of a large collision that destroyed a moon.