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TOPIC: Titan
Blobrana


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RE: Titan
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The Cassini spacecraft's Titan Radar Mapper instrument imaged this area atop Xanadu, the bright area of Titan, on April 30, 2006.

The picture is roughly 150 kilometres wide by 400 kilometres long, and shows features as small as 350 meters. Chains of hills or mountains are revealed by the radar beam, which is illuminating their northern sides (in this image, north is up).


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Credit NASA/JPL

Interspersed between the chains of hills are darker areas where topographic features are absent or partly buried. The darkest areas could contain liquids, which tend to reflect the radar beam away from Cassini in the absence of winds, making the area appear quite dark.
At Titan's icy conditions, these liquids would be methane and/or ethane. Stubby drainage features can be see faintly between the chains of hills, suggesting flow of the liquid across parts of the region.

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Blobrana


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Xanadu Hills
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This complex area of hilly terrain and erosional channels is located atop Xanadu, the continent-sized region on Saturn's moon Titan. The Cassini Titan Radar Mapper captured this image on April 30, 2006. It shows details as small as 350 meters. Each side of the picture covers 200 kilometres.


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Credit: NASA/JPL

Chains of hills or mountains are located near the bottom of the image, appearing bright on their north side (toward the top in this image). Extending further north is a drainage region where liquids flowed, eroding the presumably water-ice bedrock of Xanadu. Careful inspection reveals a series of faint drainage channels, some of which appear to empty into the dark region near the top of the image. Liquid methane might be fed from springs within Xanadu or by occasional rainfall suspected to occur on Titan. There is evidence for this rainfall in images taken by the Descent Imager/ Spectral Radiometer camera on the Huygens probe as it landed, well to the west of this area, on January 14, 2005.

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Blobrana


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Posts: 131433
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RE: Titan
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This image from the Synthetic Aperture Radar instrument on the Cassini spacecraft shows the radar-bright region Xanadu and two circular features interpreted to be degraded impact craters. In radar images, bright regions indicate a rough or scattering material, while a dark region might be smoother or more absorbing.
The image was acquired during a flyby of Titan on April 30, 2006.


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Near the top of the image is a 70-kilometer-wide impact structure. In contrast to a similarly sized crater called Sinlap, this crater shows a prominent central peak, indicating that the interaction between the impact and the crust was different in this region.
Near the bottom of the image is another circular feature with a dark central region that does not show evidence of a central peak. Numerous radar-bright channels cut across the image, indicating that liquids have flowed in this region.

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Blobrana


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This image from the Synthetic Aperture Radar instrument on the Cassini spacecraft shows the radar-bright western margin of Xanadu, one of the most prominent features on Titan. In radar images, bright regions indicate a rough or scattering material, while a dark region might be smoother or more absorbing. The image was taken during a flyby of Titan on April 30, 2006.


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Narrow, sinuous, radar-bright channels, meandering like a maze, are seen on the right-hand-side of the image. These may be river networks that might have flowed onto the dark areas on the left of the image. Vast, dark areas covered by dunes are seen on the equatorial regions of Titan and have been referred to as Titan's "sand seas". Near the middle of the image is a radar-bright area that has a boundary with the dark sand seas. Because the radar illumination is coming from the top, this indicates that the bright region, Xanadu, is topographically higher than the sand seas.


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Blobrana


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Titan surface
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This poster shows a composite view from the descent imager/spectral radiometer taken while the European Space Agency's Huygens probe was setting on Titan's surface, juxtaposed with a similarly scaled picture taken on the Moon's surface. Objects near the center of the picture are roughly the size of a person's foot. Objects at the horizon are a fraction of a person's height. The Huygens image was taken on January 14, 2005.


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Blobrana


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Titan snowballs
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When printed on letter sized paper this poster shows the size of the 'rocks' on Titan's surface in their true size. The left image was taken with the descent imager/spectral radiometer onboard the European Space Agency's Huygens probe. The Huygens image was taken on January 14, 2005.


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Blobrana


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Posts: 131433
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RE: Titan
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The Cassini space probe has seen sand dunes on Saturn's giant moon Titan. The bright features in the radar photo are not clouds but topographic features among the dunes


Credit: NASA/JPL

The sand dunes are sculpted like Namibian sand dunes on Earth.


Credit: NASA/JSC

The images taken when the Cassini spacecraft flew by Titan last October show dunes 100 meters high that run parallel to each other for hundreds of miles at Titan's equator. One dune field runs more than 1500 km long.
How the sand formed is a puzzle.
Sand may have formed when liquid methane rain eroded particles from ice bedrock. Researchers had previously thought that it doesn't rain enough on Titan to erode much bedrock.

-- Edited by Blobrana at 02:09, 2006-05-05

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Blobrana


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Huygens Landing Site
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This poster shows a flattened (Mercator) projection of the Huygens probe's view from 10 kilometres altitude. The images that make up this view were taken on Jan. 14, 2005, with the descent imager/spectral radiometer onboard the European Agency's Huygens probe.


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Blobrana


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Huygens probe's landing
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Scientists at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL) have made two new movies of the Huygens probe's landing on Saturn's giant moon, Titan, on Jan. 14, 2005.

The movies were made from images taken by Huygens' Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer (DISR) during its 147-minute plunge through Titan's thick orange-brown atmosphere to a soft sandy riverbed. They are the most realistic way yet to experience the far-out-world landing.
These represent the best visual product from the mission obtained so far and the most realistic way yet to experience the landing on a far-away world.
The movie ‘View from Huygens on 14 January 2005’ shows in 4 minutes 40 seconds what the probe actually ‘saw’ within the few hours of the descent and the eventual landing.

"At first the Huygens camera just saw haze over the distant surface" - DISR team member Erich Karkoschka, from the DISR team at the University of Arizona and creator of the movies.


This poster shows a flattened (Mercator) projection of the view from the descent imager/spectral radiometer on the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe at four different altitudes. The images were taken on Jan. 14, 2005.
Credits: ESA/NASA/JPL/University of Arizona


Play movie (11mb)

The second, more technical movie (called ‘DISR movie’), shows DISR's 4-hour operating life in less than five minutes, too. A detailed caption to explain how the movie is structured is provided with the video.
The scientists analysed Huygens' speed, direction of motion, rotation and swinging during descent, represented in this movie. The video also features Huygens' trajectory views from the south, indication of the large and unexpected parachute movements, the changing direction of view as Huygens rotates along with the relative positions of the sun and Cassini, and a clock to follow the actual sequence of events.
Sounds from a left speaker trace Huygens' motion, with tones changing with rotational speed and the tilt of the parachute. There are also clicks that clock the rotational counter, as well as sounds for the probe's heat shield hitting Titan's atmosphere, parachute deployments, heat shield release, jettison of the DISR cover and touch-down.

Sounds from a right speaker go with DISR activity. There's a continuous tone that represents the strength of Huygens' signal to Cassini.

http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/DISR/

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Blobrana


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Posts: 131433
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Shikoku Facula
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This image of Saturn's moon Titan from the Synthetic Aperture Radar instrument on the Cassini spacecraft shows Shikoku Facula, a region that is bright in both radar and visible wavelengths.
This radar image was taken on April 30, 2006.


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A circular feature with a radar-dark interior, probably an impact crater, is seen near the top of the image and is about 35 kilometres in diameter. Numerous linear dark features are seen running across the image, mostly on the right-hand side. These features were seen on other radar images and interpreted as dune fields. Bright, ridge-like features mainly on the lower half of the image may be topographically high regions. Radar-dark, thin, sinuous features, which may be channels draining from the bright to the dark regions, are seen below the circular feature.

-- Edited by Blobrana at 00:13, 2006-05-04

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