Lakes by radar

[mmcirvin]

The south pole of Titan doesn't have as many methane/ethane lakes as the north pole, probably just because of the seasons—it will be interesting to see if this changes toward northern-hemisphere summer. These pictures are built up of radar swaths imaged by Cassini's big radio dish as it repeatedly flies past Titan on its various orbits around Saturn. All the colors in the pictures are fake; the interpretation is just that dark, smooth areas are probably liquid.

Comments

[tau-iota-mu-c.livejournal.com]

They faked the Titan flyby? Is there nothing sacred for NASA anymore?

[eb-oesch.livejournal.com]

Yes, the Titan flyby was a NASA Level 1 Collective Event (CE1), that is, an ordinary event that never occurred. On the other hand, flybys of Epimetheus or of any other alleged minor moons "discovered" by the Voyager missions are CE2s -- nonevents that occurred in places that do not exist. A CE3 (technically a CE3a, actually, since the initial CE3 project involved an investigation into the plausibility of exploiting the uncertainty about time created by Einstein's theory and quantum mechanics by purportedly conducting experiments at times or in "timelines" that do not exist, but NASA scrapped and replaced by the "new CE3"), meanwhile, is an alleged event that is actually meaningless, but for historical reasons there do not exist any well-known CE3s yet.

It is rumored that NASA put its CE3 program on hiatus in the 1960s after initial efforts performed poorly during pre-launch tests -- where of course I use the word "launch" in the metaphorical sense associated with advertising campaigns, not in the literal sense of sending manmade devices into space. At the time, NASA conducted most of its pre-launch tests in closed-ward psychiatric facilities in the midwest, although I have not been able to verify that the CE3s specifically were tested at these locations. Later NASA sold these prototype CE3s to Hollywood, which is why we associate "reversing the polarity of the dilithium crystals" with Star Trek characters instead of Werner von Braun. However, the recent discussion of "Superstring theory" suggests that NASA has revived the CE3 program and put it on a more conservative deployment schedule. I'm not aware of any announced missions to measure B-9 counterphase mode Planck superknot oscillations or any such gobbledegook, but clearly the groundwork is being laid.

Hope this helps.