Images of Titan's surface from Cassini's April 16, 2005 flyby continue to
reveal the incredibly intricate nature of the boundaries between dark and
bright material.
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 mosaic at the right consists of four narrow-angle camera
frames taken during the April flyby and highlights intriguing features
seen along a boundary between bright and dark terrain. The image at the
left shows the location of this mosaic within a lower resolution mosaic of
images taken during the March 2005 flyby (see PIA06222).
The outline of the bright and dark boundary in some places suggests
fluvial (river or stream) activity, particularly along the margin of the
dark region that extends north near the top center of the mosaic. Along
the mosaic's western edge, dark, curving and linear features can be seen
running from the bright area into the dark area, similar to other
channel-like features seen in previous flybys (see PIA06202).
Data taken by the synthetic aperture radar experiment during the February
2005 flyby of Titan covers much of the region shown in the mosaic at
right, particularly along its northern and western edges. For example,
the bright oval-shaped feature (34 kilometers, or 21 miles across) near
the lower right corner of the mosaic corresponds to the bright feature
seen in the lower left corner of a previously released radar image from
February (see PIA07368). Comparing the
same features as seen by different instruments will be important in
understanding how these features formed. Furthermore, it will help to
constrain what exactly each instrument is detecting (i.e., surface
roughness vs. brightness, surface vs. subsurface, topographic effects, etc.).
The new mosaic at the right is centered on 11 degrees north latitude, 27
degrees west longitude. The image has been rotated so that north is up.
Each of the four frames consists of five individual images that have been
added together and enhanced to bring out surface detail and reduce noise,
although some camera artifacts remain.
These images were taken 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 at distances ranging from approximately
57,000 to 46,000 kilometers (35,400 to 28,600 miles). The pixel scale
ranges from 670 to 550 meters (0.4 to 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.
