[X] My Assistant

[Juramike]

Rev 69 Looking ahead is up!

http://ciclops.org/view/4889/Rev_69

The T44 Flyby highlights include:

1. ISS of Hotei Arcus
2. SAR RADAR Swath over Xanadu (Tui Regio) and N Central Shangri La (this is gonna be good!) and S Dilmun
3. More radiometry and scatterometry (over W Belet?)

-Mike

[Juramike]

I think there's some seriously complicated stuff going on in this image:



I suspect that there is a long channel (tectonic fault? ancient riverbed?) running from NW to SE (red arrows in image; red dotted line in diagram).
This may have been an old river channel.

This runs parallel to the bright dark boundary and seems to run parallel to some of the mountain chains (and also to the RADAR seam - so the line up of the mountain chain could be a look angle effect).

The violent bend (indicated by blue arrow in image) in the western wide RADAR-bright channel (channel A, dark blue in the diagram) happens right where it intersects this long channel. Could it be that it captured part of the ancient stream channel?

Going upstream a tad from the first 90 degree bend, the channel turns away from the long NW to SE channel and cuts through the mountains. It appears that it's direction is altered due to a roughly W-E tectonic ridge (black dashed line in figure) that breaks the NW-SE channel.

It is VERY interesting how the Stream channel A cuts straight line through the NW-SE mountains. ("Like butter").
To me, that implies that either the stream existed first, and the mountains rose up slowly as the stream cut through (example: New River in the Appalachians) or that the river was cutting a straight course in a sl. sloping soft landscape and erosion slowly revealed the mountain range as the covering landscape eroded away (example: Green River through the Uinta Mountians).

On the other side of the EW tectonic ridge, near the circular feature there is a RADAR-brighter wispy feature ("B", light blue, I'm not comfortable calling it a channel near the circular feature) that runs roughly parallel to the tectonic ridge until it turns into the NW-SE long channel.

The current drainage pattern seems to be constrained by the EW tectonic ridges, but use (capture) segments of the (older?) NW-SE long channel.

-Mike