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TOPIC: Titan
Blobrana


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RE: Titan clouds
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Titan's northernmost latitudes were imaged by the Cassini spacecrafts narrow-angle camera using a combination of spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths of polarised ultraviolet light. The ultraviolet spectral filter allow the camera to capture the moon's rapidly rotating stratospheric clouds.

titan08907
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Credit NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

The view was taken from about 50 degrees above Titan's equatorial plane. Titan is 5,150 kilometres across.
The view was captured on Feb. 25, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometres from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 63 degrees. Image scale is 8 kilometres per pixel.

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Blobrana


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Titan T27
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Cassini encounters Titan for the 28th time on March 26, with a closest approach distance of only 1,010 km (627 mi). Like T25 and T26 during the previous couple of orbits, this flyby (known as T27) will allow for imaging of the northern portion of Titan's trailing hemisphere following closest approach. The Cassini cameras will take two mosaics of this region.

TITANmarch26_07
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Credit NASA

This mosaic (and a lower resolution context mosaic) focuses on a region centred at 45º North Latitude, 240º West Longitude, north of the dark region named Belet. The T27 observations will allow for a follow-up on discoveries made in T25 and T26 images, such as the ISS discovery of a Caspian-Sea-sized body of (presumably liquid hydrocarbons) and an examination of some of the terrain observed by the RADAR instrument during T21 (December 12, 2006). The discovery of northern mid-latitude clouds last month suggests that observations such as these may also allow for cloud tracking. During closest approach, the Cassini bistatic experiment will use the high-gain antenna to search for specular reflections on Titan's surface and to study the electrical properties of the surface. One of the regions that the bistatic experiment will probe is in the south polar region, just east of the large dark feature named Ontario Lacus, seen in ISS images and the first lake-like feature discovered by Cassini. The bistatic results may provide additional evidence that the dark features seen in the south polar region, which imaging team members have been presuming since June 2005 constitute a 'lake district' at the south pole, are filled with liquid, like similar features observed at the north pole.

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Blobrana


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RE: Titan
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This image of Titan was taken by the Cassini spaceprobe on March 26, 2007, when it was approximately 181,433 kilometres away.

TITAN26719
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Credit NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

The image was taken using the CB3 and IRP0 filters.

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Blobrana


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This image of Titan was taken by the Cassini spaceprobe on March 26, 2007, when it was approximately 254,367 kilometres away.

TITAN26764
Credit NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

The image was taken using the CB3 and CL2 filters.

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Blobrana


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This image of Titan was taken by the Cassini spaceprobe on March 27, 2007, when it was approximately 267,288 kilometres away.

titan80099
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Credit NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

The image was taken using the CL1 and CB3 filters.


This image of Titan was taken by the Cassini spaceprobe on March 27, 2007, when it was approximately 253,968 kilometres away.

Titan80082
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Credit NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

The image was taken using the CL1 and CB3 filters.


This image of Titan was taken by the Cassini spaceprobe on March 26, 2007, when it was approximately 236,770 kilometres away.

titan80061
Expand (175kb, 1024 x 1024)
Credit NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

The image was taken using the CL1 and CB3 filters.

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Blobrana


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Crater Ksa
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ksa_crater
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Credit: NASA/JPL

This image from Cassini's radar instrument shows impact crater Ksa, with a diameter of 30 kilometres, on the surface of Saturn's moon Titan. The difference in overall appearance between this crater, which has a central peak, and those without, such as Sinlap, indicates variations in the conditions of impact, thickness of the crust, or properties of the meteorite that made the crater. The dark floor indicates smooth or highly absorbing materials.

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Blobrana


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Crater Menrva
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menrva_crater
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Credit: NASA/JPL

The huge impact crater Menrva was spotted by the Cassini radar instrument on 15 February 2005 on Titan and has an outer diameter of 440 kilometres. It resembles a large crater or part of a ringed basin, either of which could be formed when a comet or asteroid tens of kilometres in size crashed into Titan.

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Blobrana


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RE: Titan
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Cassini peers through the murky orange haze of Titan to spy what are believed to be bodies of liquid hydrocarbons, two of them as large as seas on Earth, near the moon's north pole.
The largest of these, on the left, is as big as the Caspian Sea on Earth; the next largest, on the right, is about the size of Lake Superior. When compared to the surface area of Titan however (which is six times smaller than Earth's), these bodies are equivalent in size to the Bay of Bengal and Timor Sea, respectively. Geographically speaking, they are more like seas.
The extreme darkness of these regions in the radar data argues strongly for the presence of liquid hydrocarbons, such as methane and ethane, which remain liquid at Titan's frigid temperature of minus 180 degrees Celsius (minus 288 degrees Fahrenheit).
This image of the north pole of Saturn's largest moon is a near natural-colour view and an infrared glimpse of Titan's surface obtained by cameras aboard Cassini.
The lake-like shoreline of the largest of these, called Ontario Lacus, its size is equivalent in size to the Black Sea. Now, by inference, scientists are more confident that it, and the smaller features that dot the south pole, are also likely open bodies of liquid, and in aggregate make up a southern wetlands on Titan, similar to the one observed in the north polar movie.

Titan08365
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Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

This image was taken by the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 25, 2007, at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometres from Titan. The infrared images were taken with a special filter centred at 938 nanometers that provides the cameras' best view of Titan's surface features. This view was then composited with images taken at 619, 568 and 440 nanometers to create a near natural colour appearance. The radar data were acquired in synthetic aperture radar mode.

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Blobrana


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This view of Titan taken on Feb. 25, 2007, reveals a giant lake-like feature in Titan's North Polar Region. It is approximately 1,100 kilometres long and has a surface area slightly smaller than that of Earth's largest lake, the Caspian Sea.

titan8363
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Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

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Blobrana


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RE: Titan Sea
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This image of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, obtained by Cassini's radar instrument during a near-polar flyby on Feb. 22, 2007, features dunes and lakes, one of which is larger than any lake on Earth and could be legitimately called a sea. First discovered by Cassini's radar in July 2006, Titan's lakes are thought to consist of liquid methane and ethane.

titan9182
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Credit NASA/JPL

The image runs from southern latitudes, starting at 32 degrees south, 55 degrees west, where we see featureless terrain with bright streaks, heading north and slightly east, through dune fields interspersed with exposed bright mounds. In places, the dunes wrap around the bright mounds, which suggests the mounds are raised. In one case, the dunes wrap around an unusual rose-shaped structure, approximately 70 kilometres across. Near the spacecraft's closest approach (33 degrees north, 28 degrees west), where the swath is at its narrowest, the terrain is dark and mottled, with occasional bright outcrops and fine dunes. As we continue to head north, we see the first signs of the action of liquids -- fine channels and canyon-like structures. Later, depressions can be seen. These are similar to those seen in the lake region and are interpreted as volcanic calderas or drained lakes. As the swath continues, these become more plentiful, and some are partly filled with dark material thought to be liquid hydrocarbons, hence lakes. In places, the lakes reside in what appear to be nested, near-circular depressions, reminiscent of nested calderas.
The final section of the swath, which is closest to the pole, contains by far the largest lakes observed by Cassini's radar to date. Part of the first of these was seen during a previous flyby, and is fed by a long river -- over 200 kilometres in length, and hundreds of meters to over 1 kilometre in width - running through what appears to be a flood plain. The lake's bright, jutting shoreline indicates that old, eroded landforms may have been flooded. The end of the next lake was also observed before, appearing to be, in both form and scale, similar to Lake Powell, a flooded drainage system in Utah and Arizona. We can now see that this lake on Titan connects via a relatively narrow channel to a much larger (at least 45,000 square kilometres) lake, containing a large (approximately 12,000 square kilometres) island or peninsula. The last part of the image passes close to the pole (86 degrees north, 290 degrees east), before heading east and slightly south. At the end of the swath, we see the largest lake observed yet -- at least 100,000 square kilometres, which is greater in extent than one of the largest lakes on Earth, Lake Superior (82,000 square kilometres), and covers a greater fraction of Titan than the largest terrestrial inland sea, the Black Sea. The Black Sea covers 0.085 percent of the surface of the Earth; this newly observed body on Titan covers at least 0.12 percent of the surface of Titan. Because of its size, scientists are calling this a sea.


-- Edited by Blobrana at 00:22, 2007-03-14

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