Dunes and More Dunes
This image of Titan was taken with the Cassini Synthetic Aperture Radar instrument on Oct. 28, 2005.
Date: 28 Oct 2006
This was the fourth flyby of Titan during which radar images were obtained, and this pass considerably expanded the coverage of Titan's surface.
The swath is about 6,150 kilometers kilometers (3,821 miles) long, extending from 7 degrees north to 18 degrees south latitude and 179 west to 320 west longitude.
The spatial resolution of the radar images ranges from about 300 meters (984 feet) per pixel to about 1.5 kilometers (0.9 miles) per pixel. It covers the area where the Huygens probe landed (eastern end of the swath), giving geologic context for the landing site.
The most ubiquitous features in this swath are "cat scratches," which are interpreted as longitudinal dunes and were first seen in the February 2005 flyby, see Titan, a Geologically Dynamic World.
Also prominent are long, bright ridges, concentrated near the eastern end of the swath. These may be tectonic in origin, and are seen for the first time here. No impact craters are seen, indicating a young surface.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The radar instrument was built by JPL and the Italian Space Agency, working with team members from the United States and several European countries.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov .
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute