HR: 17:20h
AN: P44A-05    [Abstracts]
TI: Titan's surface near the Huygens landing site
AU: * Keller, H
EM: keller@mps.mpg.de
AF: Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Max-Planck-Str. 2, Katlenburg-Lindau, 37191, Germany
AU: Grieger, B
EM: grieger@mps.mpg.de
AF: Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Max-Planck-Str. 2, Katlenburg-Lindau, 37191, Germany
AU: Kueppers, M
EM: kueppers@mps.mpg.de
AF: Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Max-Planck-Str. 2, Katlenburg-Lindau, 37191, Germany
AU: Schroeder, S
EM: schroder@mps.mpg.de
AF: Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Max-Planck-Str. 2, Katlenburg-Lindau, 37191, Germany
AU: Skorov, Y
EM: skorov@mps.mpg.de
AF: Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Max-Planck-Str. 2, Katlenburg-Lindau, 37191, Germany
AB: The Cassini/Huygens probe landed on a dark flat area near a bright hilly terrain. Channels and islands are indicative for a large scale flow along the coastline-like boundary separating the dark from the bright area. The cobbles seen in the images after landing seem to be distributed by a flood with a flow speed of about 1 ms^{- 1}. The hilly terrain is furrowed by valleys forming dendritic systems. The dark appearance of the valley bottoms in the images could be caused by varying illumination and reflectivity of the topographic shapes. No dark material is needed. During time of precipitation the hills are eroded and bright material is transported into the lake. The analysis of the down looking spectrometer data show a weak gradient of the surface reflectivity perpendicular to the coastline. The hilly terrain exhibits a redder spectrum than the lake area. A terrain with similar properties can be identified south of the landing spot. The surface reflectivity shows variations with phase angle and a back scattering enhancement is found when the surface lamp dominates the illumination.
DE: 5415 Erosion and weathering
DE: 6281 Titan
SC: Planetary Sciences [P]
MN: 2007 Joint Assembly