Carolina Martinez (818)
354-9382
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena,
Calif.
News Release: 2005-029
February 16, 2005
Cassini's Radar Spots Giant
Crater on Titan
A
giant impact crater the size of Iowa was spotted on Saturn's moon Titan by
NASA's Cassini radar instrument during Tuesday's Titan flyby.
Cassini
flew within 1,577 kilometers (980 miles) of Titan's surface and its radar
instrument took detailed images of the surface. This is the third close Titan
flyby of the mission, which began in July 2004, and only the second time
the radar instrument has examined Titan. Scientists see some things that
look familiar, along with scenes that are completely new.
The
new radar images are available at: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov
and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini
.
"It's
reassuring to look at two parts of Titan and see similar things," said Dr.
Jonathan Lunine, Cassini interdisciplinary scientist from the University
of Arizona, Tucson. "At the
same time, there are new and strange things."
This
flyby is the first time that Cassini's radar and the imaging camera
overlapped. This overlap in
coverage should be able to provide more information about the surface
features than either technique alone. The 440-kilometer-wide (273-mile)
crater identified by the radar instrument was seen before with Cassini's
imaging cameras, but not in this detail.
A
second radar image released today shows features nicknamed "cat
scratches". These parallel
linear features are intriguing, and may be formed by winds, like sand
dunes, or by other geological processes.
On
Thursday, Cassini will conduct its first close flyby of Saturn's icy
moon Enceladus (en-SELL-uh-duss) at a distance of approximately
1,180 kilometers (730 miles).
Enceladus is one of the most reflective objects in the solar system, so
bright that its surface resembles freshly fallen snow.
The
Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European
Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a
division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages
the Cassini mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington,
D.C. JPL designed, developed
and assembled the Cassini orbiter.
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