[X] My Assistant

[alan]

Want to know what areas Cassini will be observing in future passes? The solar system simulator now allows you to see through Titan's clouds

http://space.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/wspace?t...=1&showsc=1

[alan]

Oops

How far are they off, is it 180 degrees or some intermediate value.

[titanicrivers]

It almost seems like its 180 degrees, as if the wrong hemisphere was originally designated the Saturn-facing hemisphere. This equinox period during which many raw images of Titan were taken, dated and posted on the Cassini web site should be a good time to align your otherwise beautiful graphic of Titan with the raw image surface photos, much like I have done for the Celestia program Titan images shown above. There are probably more precise ways to do this but aligning the images with different sets of photos taken weeks apart might be a sensitive way to check both the rotational and orbital motions of Titan. One might look at the Ciclops web site for the different Titan encounters for the last 5 visits or so and the mission description which has views of Titan from Cassini usually 2 hrs before and 2 hours after a close encounter.

[titanicrivers]

Comparing the SSS with Cassini from Aug. 25, 2009. SSS set to show Titan from Cassini on Aug 25, 2009 @ 21:25 UTC. Both SSS and Cassini wide angle camera image are from about 172.3 k Km (click on image below). Celestia grids help to quantitate the differences between the actual view from the spacecraft (right panels) and the SSS projected views (left panels). SSS shows the opposite hemisphere close to 180 degrees away and seems to have the view with north up rather than leaving it as a raw image from the camera-spacecraft perspective. Hopefully corrections to the SSS Titan surface rendering program module can be made to closely match such Cassini images and saved so that other time epochs will be rendered more accurately.