Updated Titan Map Options

[alan]

I'm looking for a recent map ot Titan. Steve Albers's page links to one done by Fridger Schrempp in April 2005. Cassini has done a dozen flybys since then. Does anyone know if an updated map has been released.

[nprev]

Just had an odd thought...Is Titan a cold "desert" planet?

Specifically, it almost seems as if the polar regions are the only areas where precipitation seems to occur with any degree of regularity. If Titan was a terrestrial planet with a similar pattern, the expectation would be that the lower latitudes were too hot to sustain an Earth-style hydrological cycle, and only the poles were temperate enough for habitation...like some of the pre-UMSF ideas about Venus, in some ways.

Again, just a thought. No matter how good our maps get, I think that interpreting them within an understandable framework will be a challenge for a LONG time.

[Bob Shaw]

Just had an odd thought...Is Titan a cold "desert" planet?

Hmm... ...that'd mean camels, wouldn't it? Camels might indicate *life*. If there's life there must be awl (it's a dessert, see?). If there's awl, we better invade!

Hey, things are looking up for the unmanned spaceflight budgie!

Still, if it's a dessert the proof will always be in the pudding.


Bob Shaw

[nprev]

Hmm... ...that'd mean camels, wouldn't it? Camels might indicate *life*. If there's life there must be awl (it's a dessert, see?). If there's awl, we better invade!

Hey, things are looking up for the unmanned spaceflight budgie!

Still, if it's a dessert the proof will always be in the pudding.
Bob Shaw

Well, at least we know the ice cream won't melt...EVER!

BTW, does anyone know what the current thinking is as far as 'methane monsoons'? Presumably they occur (if in fact they do) twice per Saturn year as the polar illumination gradually switches, and they probably wouldn't happen precisely at the time of the equinox due to thermal inertia. Any evidence of convective clouds creeping north from the southern hemisphere yet, or even happening further south due to the aformentioned inertia?

Some of the features in the equatorial regions remind me more and more of arroyos in the US Southwest. You have to wonder whether the atmosphere becomes supersaturated with methane and then one day just busts loose all over the equator...

[JRehling]

Well, at least we know the ice cream won't melt...EVER!

BTW, does anyone know what the current thinking is as far as 'methane monsoons'? Presumably they occur (if in fact they do) twice per Saturn year as the polar illumination gradually switches, and they probably wouldn't happen precisely at the time of the equinox due to thermal inertia. Any evidence of convective clouds creeping north from the southern hemisphere yet, or even happening further south due to the aformentioned inertia?

Some of the features in the equatorial regions remind me more and more of arroyos in the US Southwest. You have to wonder whether the atmosphere becomes supersaturated with methane and then one day just busts loose all over the equator...

I happened to drive across Arizona on I40 on a snowy day shortly after the second (?) Cassini flyby of Titan and I couldn't help but notice how much it seemed to fit what we knew about Titan.

What we know from Voyager and Cassini seems to indicate that the summer pole gets a ring of convection around 80 N/S that creates a lot of rain there. What happens at the equinox or in the dark of the winter pole we don't know yet, but notice that there appear to be lakes in the winter pole now and perhaps at the summer pole as well. I imagine Ralph Lorenz has ventured some opinions. I would guess that the (near) poles get more rain than any other location, enough to fill up lakes that are still full through a decades-long drought.

One of the most important things about Cassini's extended mission will be to see what seasonal changes take place on Titan. Bigger cloud structures can be seen from Earth, though, and presumably from the Webb Space Telescope.