[X] My Assistant

[Mariner9]

The rule of thumb being bandied about by the project scientists and engineers is that the visual infrared imagary of Titan is degraded by the haze, and the effective resolution is roughly a factor of five higher than the listed "per pixel" value.

So, most of the imagary I've seen so far seems to be effectively above 2-3KM per pixel.

Cassini passes fairly close to Titan, I would think we'd be getting images in the 50-100 meter ranges, but I'm not seeing any images like that.

I'm assuming this has a lot to do with approach geometry and my impression that the best images are taken much closer to areas corresponding to Titan noon, than say Titan 6:00PM. So far the closest approaches were probably closer to the terminator than the center of the dayside, so we're getting much lower resolution. I also imagine that the time-share situtation with the instrument pointing (God I miss the Voyager and Galileo scan platforms) has something to do with this also.

My question is this, later in the tour are we going to get any of the visual imagary at that higher resolution, so we can make out features smaller than the current sets?

And any idea just how high resolution we can hope for?

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

The figure mentioned by Elizabeth Turtle at the COMPLEX meeting was about 1 km -- but that may have been for the longer-wavelength VIMS images, which are much clearer.