Titan revisited
Posted on Saturday 22 April 2006
Descending to Titan. View to the West.
Interest in Saturn's moon Titan appears to have dried up a bit like its famous "oceans" and the excitement now seems to have shifted to the icy moon, Enceladus. Still, those descent images when they first started to come through in late 04 and early 05 were certainly tantalising even if they were somewhat blurry and ill-defined [1].
The Lunar and Planetary Lab at the University of Arizona was busy last year removing artifacts and compositing mosaics of the collected images and they published them in Nature. I hadn't heard much in the news since then so I was curious to know whether there had been any progress in the image processing.
Visiting their website, I noticed that they had recently released a video which reconstructs the probe's descent. The result is pretty nice although its also pretty huge with a file size weighing in at 88MB. If the prospect of downloading such a thing sounds daunting, I've made this 1.1MB highly compressed excerpt which should give you a sense of what it's like.
3D view of the reconstructed Titan surface. The "rocks" in this picture are actually lumps of ice.
Also, as is my wont, I took the opportunity to synthesize this 3D image (above) by sampling two frames from the video. To view the 3D effect you'll need to use the cross-eye technique. As usual all caveats apply, if you happen to break anything while looking at this image then you own both halves.
[1] descent pictures - be sure to read commenter Tim May's take on the Titan descent as it happened. It's great stuff.
