Groovy hills rising from Titan surface
Tue Jan 26, 2010 at 13:50 UTC
Hills with a wrinkly radial pattern stand out in a new radar image captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft on Dec. 28, 2009.
The grooved mounds in the picture, which are located in a northern hemisphere region known as Belet, are about 80 kilometers (50 miles) wide and about 60 meters (200 feet) high.
The shapes of these landscape features have not been seen on Titan before, though they bear similarity to spidery features known as coronae on Venus. A corona is a circular to elliptical feature thought to result from the flow of heat in a planet's interior.
Like forensic scientists, radar team members are trying to sleuth out what created these lines and hills on Titan.
"This star-shaped pattern of the hills indicates something significant happening in the middle of the star," said Steve Wall of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., a Cassini scientist on the radar team. "It might be caused by tectonic forces, such as the forces that pull the crust of a planet apart, or rainfall that leads to erosion, or an ice intrusion like a dike."
All of these forces produce grooves on Earth's surface, but Wall says the radar team is not yet sure what is happening on Titan.
High resolution image
Another intriguing thing about this image is that in this image the "light" (actually the radar illumination) comes from the top. With this kind of illumination, the upper side of these mountains should be bright because they face the illumination, but the left side of the upper-center feature and the right side of the lower feature are bright. The brightness indicates that there is a different material in these areas, and the grooves exist in both dark and light materials.
The Titan Radar Mapper acquired this image at 41 degrees north latitude and 213 degrees west longitude on December 28, 2009. The image measures 250 kilometers (160 miles) high and 285 kilometers (180 miles) wide, with resolution of about 350 meters (1,100 feet) per pixel. North is left, and the image is illuminated from the top. Incidence angle varies from 11 to 25 degrees.
Two dark horizontal lines that run across the middle of the image show the joints between individual radar beams and are not features on the Titan surface.
Credit: NASA/JPL
| Source: Jet Propulsion Laboratory | |
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