Tune in to Titan

Scarblac writes "In a little over four days, the Cassini spacecraft will finally do its first flyby of Titan, the first of 46 such flybys planned for the coming years. There will be a broadcast on NASA TV. Titan is one of the most interesting objects in the solar system, the only moon with a substantial atmosphere. A few months ago, Cassini was able to spot details of Titan's surface from far away. It should be able to improve on this dramatically - what will be discovered this time?"

Comments

The link is wrong

[Philom]

You mean http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm.

beer?

[thhamm]

nice. some info about Titan, and Saturn itself at Solarviews.

might be interesting. maybe i can finally do my extraterrestrial beerbrewing there. :P

Re:Wow @ that image of details...

[CheshireCatCO]

You weren't. We can't see the surface, not in the visible. The pictures were taken in the infrared. (Earth-based radar has also been used.)

Venus's surface has also been mapped from orbit (by Magellen) using radar. And, of course, the Venera landers got some pictures very small bits of the surface.

So all in all, they're pretty equivelent.

Re:huygens

[Ford Prefect]

Not exactly a lander, but there's the Galileo atmospheric probe which parachuted into Jupiter in late 1995.

While a successful mission, it (slightly disappointingly) didn't have any kind of camera on it . Although any pictures would almost certainly have been devoid of contrast or detail and would have overwhelmed the probe's limited communications capacity, they might have given the imagination a bit more to latch on to than the abstract instrumentation data that was returned. Probably why few people seem to have heard of this intriguing little side-mission...

Fortunately, the Huygens probe has some decent cameras. Judging by the demonstrations shown on BBC2's Horizon last night, expect full panoramic views of the atmosphere and surface of Titan, for assembling into 3D flyovers. Hooray!

Actually, a large, camera-laden spacecraft did enter the atmosphere of Jupiter more recently, but I don't think it returned too much data. It was the deliberate destruction of the main Galileo orbiter itself. ;-)