[X] My Assistant

[Nirgal]

originally from the mars/MER forum:

Nirgal. I'm very impressed with your hand-colouring skills. Perhaps you could take a swing at coloring one of the images from the surface of Titan (not many pixels to assign a colour value on those pics). I didn't like the ESA treatment which was simply to overlay the agregate colour recorded. I have seen better versions (props to Kevin Dawson), but nothing thats really grabbed me and made me say thats the one. Plenty of room for interpretation, single channel images and all that. I imagine pale ice blocks reflecting an orange sky on a dark brown beach.

Very low resolution indeed.. the raw image has only 384x192 pixels
And I too didn't like the ESA colors at all



So I did this quick one... not quite that easy because now we
almost have too *few* pixels to play with, but nevertheless ..



Don't have an account on the Titan board yet ...
will post the image there too

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

The "long winding black line" is a shallow, curving trench in the surface of the mud behind one rock -- certainly produced by the wake of liquid flowing past that rock. (A second, smaller rock just to the left and above the first one has exactly the same kind of wake, curving in exactly the same direction.) Martin Tomasko has already said that the relative scarcity of rocks (or, more accurately, pebbles) in the middle region of the image is probably a sign that it was indeed a flow channel, and I presume those sediment wakes behind the two rocks confirm this.

(Keep in mind the small scale we're looking at -- the camera was only about 35 cm above Titan's surface; the near edge of the "flow channel" was only about 1 meter from Huygens, and its far edge is about 1.5 meters away than that.)

[dvandorn]

The "long winding black line" is a shallow, curving trench in the surface of the mud behind one rock -- certainly produced by the wake of liquid flowing past that rock.  (A second, smaller rock just to the left and above the first one has exactly the same kind of wake, curving in exactly the same direction.)

I'm not *positive* that fluid is all that's carving these flow features.

There is an animated gif of a number of Huygens surface images run together that shows *something* flowing along some of these flow channels. (I downloaded the gif and didn't keep the link, but since it's a 5MB gif, I can't attach it here anymore... *sigh*...) I suspect the "ghosts" flowing through these channels are whisps of fog (for want of a better term) that are being drawn to the updraft being caused by the relatively superheated Huygens -- but they *do* follow the flow channels.

In a 1.5B atmosphere of exotic composition, isn't it possible that the air itself (especially Titan's hazy, aerosol-rich air) flows as much as blows along the surface, and creates surface features that look like liquid-carved features to those of us who live in a 1B atmosphere on a liquid-dominated surface?

Remember, on Earth (and even on Mars) there are dramatic microclimatological changes that occur in the last few centimeters above a planetary surface. There can be startling shifts in air temperature and pressure in surface-hugging layers of air only a few meters, or even a few centimeters, thick.

I think we could be seeing surface effects in the Huygens images that are unique to the Titanian environment and caused by a combination of occasional fluid fill and constant, slow, heavy, "moisture-laden" air flow.

-the other Doug