Greetings,
I was wondering if anyone else in this forum attended the AGU conference in San Francisco this past week? I made it to some of the Titan talks so here are a couple of tidbits for the time being.
The VIMS team reported on repeated passes with imaging over the same area and how the brightness changes with phase angle for several terrain types. The punchline (I had actually left before they mentioned in detail) is that one area showed variations even at the same phase angle implying some type of surface or cloud change between flybys. You can see the abstract by Googling for AGU VIMS Titan and look at the final talk #5.
On another note Larry Soderblom mentioned how the Huygens landing site was pinned down by aid of sighting the cat scratches in the outer Huygens frames. He cited Jason Perry in discussing that finding.
If you can remember some interesting tidbits from those talks accurately: "Astronomy" magazine offered to pay me $150 for a 400-word piece on the AGU talks on Saturn and Titan -- but I couldn't afford to stay long enough to attend the most interesting ones without eating up all of that $150 in motel expenses. They would, I imagine, be equally interested in such a piece from you. Talk to Laura Baird at lbaird@astronomy.com .
Thanks for the tip on the Astronomy article. I'll have to see if I have the time to put a cogent article together with the holiday season and all. In terms of filling in details it is helpful that all the abstracts are on line. Many of the talks parallel the Nature articles, so I would wonder how many of these conference tidbits are unique to the conference.
Since in my day job I do work in meteorology I was interested in the talk on HASI atmospheric measurements. One group is also running the terrestrial numerical atmospheric model called the WRF on Titan by modifying the software and parameters. The solar energy on Titan is so weak that even after 2 Titanian years the atmospheric winds haven't yet spun up to their equilibrium levels. Will be interesting to see if they can simulate methane rainstorms with the microphysics in the model.
Some of Larry Soderbloms slides, such as the low altitude Huygens panorama, looked more noise free than I had recalled. Perhaps it is in the Nature article?
One of Al McEwen's slides of a radar pass showed what looked like a wide riverbed filled with a dark fluid, a candidate for a currently flowing river with occasional widening into narrow lakes.
Another aspect of Larry Soderblom's discussion of the Huygens landing site location is that he showed (all too briefly) an animation fading between the radar only image and the radar overlain with the DISR panorama. This I have yet to see in animated form elsewhere - it's pretty slick.
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