Matching Huygens

In my previous post on René Pascal's astounding work with the Huygens descent images, I implied that there was a clear match between VIMS images and Pascal's mosaic. Actually, there isn't, or, rather, there are two. The issue is how big the features are; that "headland" has something of a self-similar quality toward the tip. As Pascal describes on his site, he has a match with VIMS that looks really good but the scale is off from JPL's published numbers; and then there's another way of matching them that gets the scale right but looks less good, but that might just be the low resolution of VIMS pictures.

Tomorrow Cassini makes a flyby of Titan that is so positioned that it can, for the first time, attempt to get a radar swath covering the Huygens landing site. This ought to resolve the issue, and maybe provide a check on interpretation of the other radar images. In general, the optical instruments have worked less well, and the radar much better, at resolving details on Titan's surface than mission planners thought they would.