Pictures of Titan's Lakes 119
sighted writes "For decades, scientists have wondered if the thick orange haze that shrouds Saturn's giant moon Titan hid lakes of liquid methane on the surface, but there was no way to confirm it, until now. The Cassini flyby of July 22, 2006 took these striking images and were released today."
More information at ... (Score:5, Informative)
The original article is in the journal Nature [nature.com], but you need a subscription to view it. You can still read the abstract [nature.com], though.
Re:It reminds me... (Score:3, Informative)
We've already landed there ffs. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Confirmed? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Liquid methane? Maybe. (Score:4, Informative)
Actually the intensity of the backscatter data is what is being shown.
The brightness is logarithmic, therefore anything dark is very smooth
and anything really bright is very bumpy. Since it is a log scale and
there is a good idea what kind of backscatter to absorption ratio to expect
from the synthetic aperture radar for various targets, they can conclude that
the dark patches are glassy/ice-rink flat.
They can also conclude that the dark patches could be liquid based on
change detection, provided they have another series of overlapping data
to compare. If the glassy areas undulate slightly between images (waves)
they are probably liquid.
Having noted this, 500 metres is kind of crappy resolution for
SAR data. You'd think they'd make a closer flyby or put a better
instrument onboard. I believe 1 (one) metre resolution SAR was available
from instruments at the same altitude when cassini was designed.
NASA just cheaped out.
Re:We've already landed there ffs. (Score:4, Informative)