Friday, July 08, 2005

Titan Rev11 Observations


I have to admit this set caught me by surprise, but there is now a full sequence of Titan images on the JPL Raw images page taken yesterday. These images were taken from a distance of 1.25 million km and have a resolution of 7.25 km/pixel. The CB3 images in the sequence, like the one above, show the western boundary of the continent-sized bright region known as Xanadu. The dark terrain to the west contains numerous bright features, often called "islands" by Cassini scientists, though there is no evidence that the dark terrain that surrounds them is liquid, in fact it is probably nothing more than a sand dune "sea". The Huygens landing site is just coming into view near the center of the terminator. This region was seen at much higher resolution during the Ta, Tb, and T3 flybys by Cassini and will be seen next during the T8 flyby in October. In the other filters, note the assymmetry in brightness between the northern and southern hemispheres in the MT3 filter image.

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