It's hard not to speculate about the origins of the narrow, dark features
seen in Cassini's new images of Titan's surface. They tantalize the
viewer, resembling the dark channels seen elsewhere on Titan, but are
just at the limits of resolution of the images (a few kilometers) -- too
close to identify their true nature.
During the two most recent flybys of Titan, on March 31 and April 16,
2005, Cassini captured a number of images of the hemisphere of Titan that
faces Saturn. The image at the left is taken from a mosaic of images
obtained in March 2005 (see PIA06222) and shows the location of the
frame at the right. The view at the right, taken during the most recent
Titan flyby, shows a close-up of the eastern portion of a large, bright
feature.
The resolution is somewhat degraded in this frame due to the low contrast
of the terrain, but several narrow, dark and branching features, which are
suggestive of channels, can be discerned.
The view at the left consists of five images that have been added together
and enhanced to bring out surface detail and to reduce noise, though some
camera artifacts remain.
These images were taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera
using a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 938
nanometers -- considered to be the imaging science subsystem's best
spectral filter for observing the surface of Titan. This view was acquired
from a distance of 40,000 kilometers (24,900 miles). The pixel scale of
this image is 470 meters (0.3 miles) per pixel, although the actual
resolution is likely to be several times larger.
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 and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and
assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science
Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.
For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org.
