This recent image of Titan reveals more complex patterns of bright and
dark regions on the surface, including a small, dark, circular feature,
completely surrounded by brighter 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 image at the left is taken from a mosaic of images
obtained in March 2005 (see PIA06222) and shows the location of the
more recently acquired image at the right. The new image shows intriguing
details in the bright and dark patterns near an 80-kilometer-wide
(50-mile) crater seen first by Cassini's synthetic aperture radar
experiment during a Titan flyby in February 2005 (see PIA07368) and
subsequently seen by the imaging science subsystem cameras as a dark spot
(center of the image at the left).
Interestingly, a smaller, roughly 20-kilometer-wide (12-mile), dark and
circular feature can be seen within an irregularly-shaped, brighter ring,
and is similar to the larger dark spot associated with the radar crater.
However, the imaging cameras see only brightness variations, and without
topographic information, the identity of this feature as an impact crater
cannot be conclusively determined from this image. The visual infrared
mapping spectrometer, which is sensitive to longer wavelengths where
Titan's atmospheric haze is less obscuring -- observed this area
simultaneously with the imaging cameras, so those data, and perhaps future
observations by Cassini's radar, may help to answer the question of this
feature's origin.
The new image at the right consists of five images that have been added
together and enhanced to bring out surface detail and to reduce noise,
although 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 33,000 kilometers (20,500 miles). The pixel scale of
this image is 390 meters (0.2 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.