Friday, February 18, 2005

60-km Crater found by Radar



This is one of three new RADAR SAR views released today (taken during this week's Titan flyby). The image shows a relatively fresh 60-km wide impact crater to the northeast of the "H". The caption explains that the bright region that surrounds that is caused by ejecta from the crater though comparisons with images to be taken of the region on March 31 will be needed to confirm this, IMHO. Though not explictly called out in the image, this view shows another bright/dark boundary with "cat-scratch" ridges. The dark terrain is part of a feature known as the "H" because it is shaped like the letter "H" (though it was later found to be connected to a circular dark region with the giant crater in the radar image released earlier near the center.

Also note the bright islands to the lower left. These appear to be similar to those seen by ISS in the dark terrain west of Xanadu and in the landing site region. Like the features seen by ISS a half a world away, the islands have diffuse aprons that generally trail the island to the east, suggesting these aprons are cause by winds blowing material away from the surface of the islands (rather than liquids, though liquids could have done the initial eroding).

1 Comments:

Blogger Jason Perry said...

In the RADAR case, because the only information they have is the RADAR brightness, though they could present this information with a gradient used for RADAR brightness. In the case of ISS images, it is because only one filter effectively sees the surface. And you can't make a color images with one filter (though you could always turn it into a color gradient, but that would like ugly).

2/18/2005 01:14:00 PM  

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