We have done a lot of imaging of Titan
SATURN'S MOON TITAN COMES INTO FOCUS TODAY
By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY
Saturn's mysterious moon Titan does a star turn today, getting a close-up from the international Cassini-Huygens space probe.
Larger than Mercury and Pluto, Titan is a full-fledged world in its own right, complete with a thick atmosphere and the largest expanse of unmapped surface geography in the solar system. At 12:44 p.m. ET, the probe will pass within 746 miles of the haze-shrouded moon's surface, snapping the closest-ever images of one side of Titan.
"I'm expecting to be pleasantly bewildered," says Torrence Johnson, an imaging scientist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Because today's flyby comes about 280 times closer to Titan than the probe did during a flyby in July, scientists hope for images that will answer questions, old and new, about the orange world.
NASA, which manages the $3.27 billion mission with the European Space Agency (ESA) and Italy's space agency (ASI), plans to release the first images from the flyby tonight.
"Titan is one of the most fascinating places in the whole solar system," says astronomer Antonin Bouchez of Hawaii's W.M. Keck Observatory, who is not a Cassini team member. "It is a completely alien place, but it may be the most Earth-like world we know, with beaches, lakes and oceans. That's what makes it interesting."
Researchers hope that with today's flyby they'll learn more about unexpected observations made during July's pass.
•White "ice" plains turned out to be mixtures of naturally occurring tar and ice, and dark "tar" plains turned out to be just ice.
•Jagged lines between plains suggest that clashing ridges, and even earthquakes, might plague Titan.
•A dearth of craters suggests that unexpected resurfacing takes place on the frozen moon.
"We'll probably see plains of tar with frozen continents of ice sticking out above them," Bouchez says. "But the truth is that nobody knows for sure."
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Space/Science » in reply to Titan encounter thread
USA today article
The whole thread (19 posts)
- Titan encounter thread
- re: Titan encounter thread
- re: Okay planetologist peoples -- your speculations, please!
- re: Titan is so amazingly weird
- Wait for the Synthetic Aperture Radar images
- re: Titan, craters, impactor flux, and "geological" activity
- That dark area sure looks like it could be liquid.
- re: I'll give it a WAG
- SpaceDaily.com has a timer. ~45 min to go.
- USA today article
