[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_*]

Well, they don't actually preclude ISS (or the other optical instruments) -- they just mean that those instruments can't make observations during the brief period of closest approach. So far, SAR has been done on four of the eight Titan flybys -- and that 50-50 division is supposed to be maintained during the rest of the mission. However, the science schedule is only worked out for the first ten or so Titan flybys in advance, and there is considerable talk of increasing radar coverage. For instance, one of the passes currently planned for gravity science (which rules out ALL other science observations), would allow either ISS-VIMS coverage of "Lake Ontario" in the south polar region, or radar altimetry of it (which might pick up a specular reflection off any liquid), or SAR mapping of some neighboring regions. It may well be reassigned for one of those goals.