T41 (Feb 22, 2008 / Rev59), SAR RADAR of Huygens Landing Site and Hotei Arcus Options

[Juramike]

LPSC abstract provides an exciting preview:

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2008/pdf/1839.pdf

-Mike

[MarcF]

I didn't know that it was possible to change the viewing side during SAR scanning !!
Really great idea !! We will get a SAR view of Hotei and a nice resolution of the Huygens landing site.
I'm expecting some surprises.
Marc.

[ngunn]

LPSC abstract provides an exciting preview:

Indeed it does. I'm really hoping that some more of the highland valley networks and lowland 'flood moraines' in the Huygens images will be resolved. With the recent VIMS close-up data (also eagerly anticipated) this flyby should wrap up Cassini's landing site imaging campaign. I expect a comprehensive synthesis of these results will be undertaken at this point.

[rlorenz]

I didn't know that it was possible to change the viewing side during SAR scanning !!
Really great idea !!

It is nice to have the flexibility to do that, but you do lose a minute or two of imaging
during the turn (there is some data but degraded)

[nprev]

...you do lose a minute or two of imaging
during the turn (there is some data but degraded)

I figured that. Just out of curiosity, can the incident angle be changed sufficiently (and rapidly enough) to reimage the same area and hopefully produce a 3D composite, or is the relative velocity too great?

[Juramike]

I'm really hoping that the "spooky dude" formation gets resolved, and that other similar "spooky dude" formations are also observed in other channels.

I've got a pet theory that the "spooky dude" formation and most of the channel was emplaced gouged during a huge earlier flood event going from E to W, followed afterwords by smaller flood event(s) going from W to E. I think that reversible channels (not tidal) might be common on Titan.

(The spooky dudes parabolic shapes point the wrong way for them to have been emplaced during a W to E flood. Also, the tops are nice and bright in DISR, indicating they were high and dry during the last flood and didn't get the "organic paint" washed off.)

If this is correct, other nearby channels may show similar patterns and parabolic shapes going from E to W.

(I'm assuming the spooky dude formation is a RADAR-brighter cobble pile and will be slightly brighter when observed by RADAR compared to muddy ice sands. There were a few bright pixels in the T8 Swath that might've been a hint of the spooky dude formation.)

And I'm really, really, really hoping that the Cassini RADAR Team makes this swath available to the public really quickly, like they did for the South Polar Dec 20th Swath.

-Mike

[volcanopele]

Rev59 Looking Ahead article is now online: http://ciclops.org/view.php?id=4788

[Juramike]

From looking ahead: "The second half of the RADAR swath will also cover a part of far southeastern Adiri, seen by ISS as an interesting patchwork of bright and dark material."

I strongly suspect that Adiri is made of tectonic ridges going EW but with broader undulations that run N-S. When the two are combined, you get the cool-o checkerboard pattern seen in SE Adiri. (In the T8 RADAR Swath you can see that some sections of the long EW ridges have a thinner ice sand mantle. They have been partially buried by dune sands and darker smoother organic-ice muds.) The bright dark checkerboard pattern is also seen by ISS.

A different look angle might get some great 3D information that might confirm this.

-Mike

[rlorenz]

I figured that. Just out of curiosity, can the incident angle be changed sufficiently (and rapidly enough) to reimage the same area and hopefully produce a 3D composite, or is the relative velocity too great?

Not sure what you mean here by 3D composite- this sounds like spotlighting (dwelling on the same spot)
which beats down the speckle noise by getting more looks, but of course then you lose
areal coverage. We've done a little bit of spotlighting with HiSAR, but not near closest approach
as spotlighting then would sacrifice good coverage

[nprev]

Ralph, I was basically asking if Cassini can take a look at the same area during the same pass maybe a minute apart for stereo imaging. This spotlighting techniques sounds like what I meant, and understand that some coverage would have to be sacrificed; probably not worth doing often, since there's a lot of first-look radar mapping yet to be done.

[ugordan]

Excuse me for stealing the thread here a bit, but there's one thing puzzling me (English not being my first language):



I was always under the impression the construct Huygen's means belonging/related to something/someone named Huygen so in this case it would be wrong to spell it that way, rather Huygens' seems correct. I thought the former was a common spelling error with names ending with 's' in the english language, but I'm seeing it more and more lately and it makes me wonder - is that valid spelling?

[dvandorn]

Ugordan -- you're right, they're wrong.

-the other Doug

[nprev]

Good eye, Gordan; incorrect usage of the possessive apostrophe is extremely common among native English-speakers in the US.

BTW, if you never told anyone that English wasn't your first language, nobody would ever know; you are incredibly fluent!

[centsworth_II]

I think the correct form would be "Huygens" with no apostrophe
at all. "The Huygens landing site" is using Huygens as a name
for the site. If the phrase were "Cassini searches Titan for Huygens'
landing site," -- without "the" before Huygens -- then Huygens'
would be correct.

[ugordan]

That makes sense, centsworth_II. No apostrophe in this case sounds right.

Well, back to our regular program schedule now.