More Titan radar images

The Cassini spacecraft's Titan Radar Mapper instrument imaged this area atop Xanadu, the bright area of Titan, on April 30, 2006.

The picture is roughly 150 kilometers (93 miles) wide by 400 kilometers (249 miles) long, and shows features as small as 350 meters (1148 feet). Chains of hills or mountains are revealed by the radar beam, which is illuminating their northern sides (in this image, north is up).
Interspersed between the chains of hills are darker areas where topographic features are absent or partly buried. The darkest areas could contain liquids, which tend to reflect the radar beam away from Cassini in the absence of winds, making the area appear quite dark. At Titan's icy conditions, these liquids would be methane and/or ethane. Stubby drainage features can be see faintly between the chains of hills, suggesting flow of the liquid across parts of the region.

 

This complex area of hilly terrain and erosional channels is located atop Xanadu, the continent-sized region on Saturn's moon Titan. The image was captured by the Cassini Titan Radar Mapper on April 30, 2006. It shows details as small as 350 meters (1148 feet). Each side of the picture covers 200 kilometers (124 miles).

Chains of hills or mountains are located near the bottom of the image, appearing bright on their north side (toward the top in this image). Extending further north is a drainage region where liquids flowed, eroding the presumably water-ice bedrock of Xanadu. Careful inspection reveals a series of faint drainage channels, some of which appear to empty into the dark region near the top of the image. Liquid methane might be fed from springs within Xanadu or by occasional rainfall suspected to occur on Titan. There is evidence for this rainfall in images taken by the Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer camera on the Huygens probe as it landed, well to the west of this area, on January 14, 2005.

 

This image was taken with the Cassini Synthetic Aperture Radar instrument on Oct. 28, 2005.

This was the fourth flyby of Titan during which radar images were obtained, and this pass considerably expanded the coverage of Titan's surface.

The swath is about 6,150 kilometers kilometers (3,821 miles) long, extending from 7 degrees north to 18 degrees south latitude and 179 west to 320 west longitude.

The spatial resolution of the radar images ranges from about 300 meters (984 feet) per pixel to about 1.5 kilometers (0.9 miles) per pixel. It covers the area where the Huygens probe landed (eastern end of the swath), giving geologic context for the landing site.

The most ubiquitous features in this swath are "cat scratches," which are interpreted as longitudinal dunes and were first seen in the February 2005 flyby.

Also prominent are long, bright ridges, concentrated near the eastern end of the swath. These may be tectonic in origin, and are seen for the first time here. No impact craters are seen, indicating a young surface.

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