First Set of Titan Rev09 Images Online
The first set of Titan images from today's flyby are online. These images are taken on Saturday and range in resolution from 9 km/pixel down to 6.8 km/pixel. An early look at this observation shows a cloud near 75S latitude in all the CB3 images. Very few clouds have been observed on Titan in the last 6 months so it has come as a surprise to find one now. It is also personally disappointing since I had hoped to have at least one observation for the entire south polar region that was cloud-free. The south pole is clear, so I can use this and hopefully images to come from this non-targeted encounter, but it will be more patchwork-y than I had hoped.
posted by Jason Perry at 6:57 AM
2 Comments:
Has anyone considered the possibility that the on-again, off-again clouds around the south pole might be generated from heat rising from a volcanic vent that just coincidentally happens to lie at the south pole? A lot of complex geology is apparent from the south polar mosaic published earlier this year: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA06203.jpg
The south polar clouds are easy to explain as convective clouds and the geology in the polar region does look an awful lot like rainfall runoff, en masse. The mid-latitude clouds, observed on other orbits, have been considered to be generated from volcanic vents, but that hasn't been substantiated.
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