[X] My Assistant

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

The mission description document is now online (1.03 Mb PDF).

[remcook]

No, I haven't seen any more of it, but of the two times we had a look at the north we've seen lake-like things. And more than one as well! I'm also not convinced they are actually lakes, but I was just expressing my enthusiasm over these exciting finds. But I think lakes are certainly not unexpected from what we now learned about clouds from Cassini.

Specular reflections would be nice...

[ugordan]

Specular reflections would be nice...

The problem is those high latitudes are pretty much in darkness right now. By the time they start receiving enough sunlight in a few years, they might be all gone.
It's kind of like the light inside the fridge -- you know it goes out when you shut the door, but you can never actually see that. In cartoons anyway.

The best case we might get is seeing Ontario Lacus' specular point close to the end of nominal mission (was it T38?). That's a south polar "lake" however. The flyby geometry would need to be just right as well for the northern passes - a nontrivial constraint.

[volcanopele]

The problem is those high latitudes are pretty much in darkness right now. By the time they start receiving enough sunlight in a few years, they might be all gone.
It's kind of like the light inside the fridge -- you know it goes out when you shut the door, but you can never actually see that. In cartoons anyway.

The best case we might get is seeing Ontario Lacus' specular point close to the end of nominal mission (was it T38?). That's a south polar "lake" however. The flyby geometry would need to be just right as well for the northern passes - a nontrivial constraint.

That's assuming of course that these lakes fill up in winter. However, given that the size of these lakes and the regular cloud activity at the southern pole, these probably fill up in the summer. We see plenty of dark, little spots in the south polar region, and not just Ontario Lacus, that are probably lakes.