This complex area of hilly terrain and erosional channels is located atop
Xanadu, the continent-sized region on Saturn's moon Titan. The image was
captured by the Cassini Titan Radar Mapper on April 30, 2006. It shows
details as small as 350 meters (1148 feet). Each side of the picture
covers 200 kilometers (124 miles).
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 (see PIA07238).
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European
Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages
the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The
Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The radar
instrument was built by JPL and the Italian Space Agency, working with
team members from the United States and several European countries.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm.
