Imaging of Titan from the Cassini spacecraft

• Published in: Nature
• Main Authors: Porco, Carolyn C., Dyudina, Ulyana, Ingersoll, Andrew P.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: Nature Publishing Group 2005
• Subjects: South pole
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature03436

Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, is the only satellite in the Solar System with a substantial atmosphere. The atmosphere is poorly understood and obscures the surface, leading to intense speculation about Titan's nature. Here we present observations of Titan from the imaging science experiment onboard the Cassini spacecraft that address some of these issues. The images reveal intricate surface albedo features that suggest aeolian, tectonic and fluvial processes; they also show a few circular features that could be impact structures. These observations imply that substantial surface modification has occurred over Titan's history. We have not directly detected liquids on the surface to date. Convective clouds are found to be common near the south pole, and the motion of mid-latitude clouds consistently indicates eastward winds, from which we infer that the troposphere is rotating faster than the surface. A detached haze at an altitude of 500 km is 150–200 km higher than that observed by Voyager, and more tenuous haze layers are also resolved. © 2005 Nature Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited. Received 11 January; accepted 7 February 2005. We acknowledge the many members of the imaging team who have assisted in the design of imaging sequences and camera commands and in other vital operational and image processing tasks, in particular N. Martin, E. Birath, J. Riley, B. Knowles, C. Clark, M. Belanger and D. Wilson. This work has been funded by NASA/JPL, the UK Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, the German Aerospace Center (DLR), and Universite Paris VII Denis Diderot, CEA, AIM, France.