[X] My Assistant

[volcanopele]

A new RADAR image of a portion of Titan's "Caspian Sea" was just publically released:

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA09211

I have to say, this is an incredible view. The first thing I though of was how much it looked like the coastline in the Pacific Northwest.

[elakdawalla]

I sent a question about the data to the RADAR team a couple of weeks ago, and the simple answer is that they haven't had time; they're drowning in data because they've had so many flybys back-to-back. Also, Steve Wall told me that he wasn't quite happy enough with the images yet to release them. They have to produce extremely precise descriptions of Cassini's course past Titan to make the SAR images from the RADAR data, and tiny tiny errors can fill the images with bands and toothy artifacts. He did tell me that at some point he was going to give up trying to make it better and just release some images; clearly he hasn't reached that point yet. They've got plenty of data, and it's great data, but knowing that the images will live forever on the Internet once they're posted, they're just trying to make sure they're happy of the quality before they're released.

--Emily

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

Also, Steve Wall told me that he wasn't quite happy enough with the images yet to release them. They have to produce extremely precise descriptions of Cassini's course past Titan to make the SAR images from the RADAR data, and tiny tiny errors can fill the images with bands and toothy artifacts.

Did something not go quite right during the SAR flyby?

[elakdawalla]

Did something not go quite right during the SAR flyby?

Everything was totally fine. Having worked a lot with Magellan SAR, I can tell you that with a good reconstruction of the flyby geometry you can get SAR images that are perfectly good enough for science. However, there can be a lot of artifacts from even the tiniest imprecision in the reconstruction of the spacecraft's position, and I can understand if the RADAR team would rather spend more time now trying to work out those artifacts than time later having to explain over and over again, "no, that's not a feature, that's an artifact" and "no, there's nothing wrong with our system, SAR is just hard to do" and "really, honestly, there's nothing wrong with the spacecraft, that's just an artifact." Give them time to make it look good.

--Emily