[X] My Assistant

[volcanopele]

The next Titan flyby is a little over a week away but it is never too early to think about it. The Looking Ahead page for Rev44 and the T30 flyby is now posted:

http://ciclops.org/view.php?id=3026

Rev44 on the whole is pretty quiet. The T30 flyby will be especially important for RADAR. The first half of the C/A pass will be dedicated to altimetry, giving RADAR their longest altimetry swath obtained to date. This swath is intended to validate their "TOPO from SAR" method of deriving altitudes. This method uses the central beam in SAR mode as a side-looking altimeter. The T30 altimetry swath will cover a number of previous SAR swaths, allowing for validation of the altitudes derived from those passes. The second half of the C/A pass is dedicated to SAR. RADAR will image the central and southern portion of the Caspian Sea (the Cassini site got it wrong, T28 was never adjusted and looked at the northern part, just like T25).

[Juramike]

There are some puzzling features in the T30 RADAR swath.

In the far western part of the swath, the dark sea and features leading into it look nice and "normal". (Deeply eroded ridges and streams that were then flooded by the hydrocarbon lake to make a pretty fractal pattern). There appears to be an E-W ridge line cutting long the western portion of the image.

But next to this is a funky looking embayment with strange surrounding features highlighted in the images below.



The bay portion does not have the dark deep smooth look that the other fractal embayments have to the west. Instead, it appears bright (rough) and cut by thin dark channels. (My mind immediately jumps to images of frozen bays in Earth's arctic, with pack ice jostling around and making rough berg fields). Could this be a field of relatively rough organic scum all packed together? Or could it be a field of dried out bay and crusty stuff coating the drying shallows?

Looking at the ridge pattern running roughly east west (pretty much like we've seen everywhere else on Titan), we would assume that the area near the bay is pretty flat and shallow. This is also evidenced by the shoreline (medium bright = land, more bright = shore) having a smoother outline and not so fractal-like. So maybe the dark channels in the crusty zone are where streams have cut through the "stuff" (whether floating or not).

Oddly enough, even though this region seems flatter, the streambeds in this area, indicated by orange arrows, are bright (rough) compared to those in the highlands to the west (indicated by blue arrows).

Maybe the stream boulders gravels are not made of water ice, but of organic shizzle chunks [don't use past tense at UMSF!] that have been carved from the surface and floated/plopped along the streambeds?

Even stranger, there is an area that looks like a type of chaos terrain (red dotted square), where the streams form a web-like network before flowing down towards the bay. This area is parallel to the tectonic ridges, so it could be a low rise or divide. Check out how the streams on both sides of this divide seem to connect. Alternatively, it could be an area with cracks in the surface shizzle making some type of wierd highland swamp that drains away on either side. It almost forms a polygonal network.

(I keep using the snow analogy for the organic shizzle-deposited areas - it seems to work, but it's important to remember that unlike snow, organic materials on Titan won't melt and might not even dissolve!)

What gives?

-Mike