First Titan flyby

[mmcirvin]

Well, the raw images don't look like much, on the whole; even with the IR/polarizer, the smog makes everything pretty indistinct. But there's this. Are there rivers down there? Canyons? Europa-style cracks? Canals built by intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic? You and your copy of Photoshop make the call!

Comments

[jarai.livejournal.com]

IWPTA "Worst Titan flyby, EVER!"

Nice mysterious picture though.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I recommend Unsharp Mask, and lots of it.

[urbeatle.livejournal.com]

the post was a hell of a lot more exciting when I thought it said "First Titan Baby".

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

nah, that was earlier (http://www.cnn.com/2004/HEALTH/06/24/muscle.gene.ap/).

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

MR. RICHARD HOAGLAND, PLEASE PICK UP THE NEAREST WHITE COURTESY PHONE.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Hoagland's been posting some breathtaking bullshit about Cassini already: he insisted that the mission was doomed to fail at closest approach because of the electrical forces that produced the "spokes" Voyager saw, and if not that, then the "hyperdimensional physics" that made Cassini NOT see the spokes. The rings of Saturn, you see, are an enormous perpetual motion free-energy generator. Then when the probe failed to explode, he immediately posted a seemingly already written essay about how the mysterious change in Saturn's radio rotation had saved it.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

What the hell is "hyperdimensional physics" supposed to be, anyway? Is Hoagland mildly schizophrenic or what?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I'm increasingly convinced that Hoagland isn't nuts at all; he's just a fraud. He's very good at making this stuff up and he's got a lucrative career out of it.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Now the imaging team site (http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/ir_index.php?id=6) has some processed pictures up, with the contrast boosted and some mosaics mapped out, and context as to what we're looking at here. Mostly, they have not the faintest idea. But that bright spot is the persistent cloud over the south pole that has been spotted from Earth on previous occasions. All I can say about the surface is that it looks damned weird.

Meanwhile, the imaging spectrometer got some much less ambiguous though much lower-resolution pictures (http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia06407.html), revealing that the big dark splotches are actually where there is less organic matter and may just be water ice. Also it looks like the round lump on the Lying H is a big crater.