T67 (April 5, 2010 / Rev 129) Options

[ngunn]

T67 Mission Description:
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/files/20100405_...description.pdf

[titanicrivers]

Another look at the T67 flyby of Titan courtesy the Solar System Simulator.

[titanicrivers]

T67 flyby view from Cassini's vantage point. The animation is a wide angle view beginning 2hrs before and ending 2 hrs after closest approach at 15hr55min on April 5th. I don't know if any wide angle camera images are planned and if so whether they will capture the Titan eclipse of Saturn that will apparently happen. Images all from the Solar System Simulator ver 4.0.

[ugordan]

I don't know if any wide angle camera images are planned and if so whether they will capture the Titan eclipse of Saturn that will apparently happen.

Your animation uses a FOV of 60 deg. At Cassini WAC FOV of 3.5 degrees, the scene would look a lot different.

[titanicrivers]

Your animation uses a FOV of 60 deg. At Cassini WAC FOV of 3.5 degrees, the scene would look a lot different.

Good point! We'll have to imagine then we are sitting on the spacecraft viewing the scene with our human eyes with their combined 120 degree (est) field of view.

[titanicrivers]

Your animation uses a FOV of 60 deg. At Cassini WAC FOV of 3.5 degrees, the scene would look a lot different.

Seems like the raw images from T67 flyby are slow in coming down from Cassini!! For some fun I've put together a brief animation in the post-T67 flyby period that covers the GLOBMAP001 ISS imaging sequence. The distance of Cassini from Titan in this sequence increases from 103,000 km to 172,000 km. All images are from the Solar System Simulator beginning with April 5 @ 21:00 and ending on April 6 @ 00:25. Time interval between images in the sequence is 5 minutes and the movie was created using Photoshop's 'flipbook' option and uploaded to YouTube. The field of view on these images is 2.0 degrees to better approximate the FOV that the Cassini cameras will be seeing. Images are rotated so N is at top.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNZJUHxLjag

[titanicrivers]

An exciting hour of Cassini observations may have been imaged on April 8th at 00:00 UTC to 01:05 UTC. Hopefully we will get to see the Rhea transit of Titan as predicted by the SSS below.

[titanicrivers]

Some nice raw images of Titan from April 8th have arrived! These are post T67 flyby from about 2.05M km. The images shown below display the CL1 UV3 filter (high altitude detached haze layer, N polar hood, N00153029) and the CL1 CB3 filter revealing the surface features (N00153027) that are mapped to a Celestia grid.

[rlorenz]

Some nice raw images of Titan from April 8th have arrived! These are post T67 flyby from about 2.05M km. The images shown below display the CL1 UV3 filter (high altitude detached haze layer, N polar hood, N00153029) .....

Cool. Quite distinct here as a collar (cf Voyager 2, 1981) rather than the 'solid' hood we've seen up to now
with Cassini (cf Voyager 1)....

With this, and VIMS evidence that the north-south hemispheric boundary has recently shifted that Jason Barnes
showed at the Titan Through Time workshop last week suggests Titan is now entering its most rapid period
of seasonal change.....

[nprev]

Monsoon season approaching?

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/imag...9/N00153157.jpg

Pretty

[volcanopele]

In case you were wondering where the T67 images were:

From: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-124

The Titan flyby took place April 5, and the Dione flyby took place April 7 in the UTC time zone, and April 6 Pacific time. During the Titan flyby, an unexpected autonomous reset occurred and Cassini obtained fewer images of Titan than expected. But the cameras were reset before reaching Dione, which was the primary target on this double flyby.

[ngunn]

I was wondering, yes. Too polite to ask. Thanks.

[ugordan]

Was it a reset of the cameras or the spacecraft computers? The release leaves it unclear.

[volcanopele]

It was the camera. I believe VIMS got their data at least. Everything seems to be fine now, as you can see, though I will admit holding my breath a bit waiting for the Dione images...