T67 Mission Description:
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/files/20100405_...description.pdf

Another look at the T67 flyby of Titan courtesy the Solar System Simulator.
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T67 flyby view from Cassini's vantage point. The animation is a wide angle view beginning 2hrs before and ending 2 hrs after closest approach at 15hr55min on April 5th. I don't know if any wide angle camera images are planned and if so whether they will capture the Titan eclipse of Saturn that will apparently happen. Images all from the Solar System Simulator ver 4.0.
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Your animation uses a FOV of 60 deg. At Cassini WAC FOV of 3.5 degrees, the scene would look a lot different.

Good point! We'll have to imagine then we are sitting on the spacecraft viewing the scene with our human eyes with their combined 120 degree (est) field of view.

Seems like the raw images from T67 flyby are slow in coming down from Cassini!! For some fun I've put together a brief animation in the post-T67 flyby period that covers the GLOBMAP001 ISS imaging sequence. The distance of Cassini from Titan in this sequence increases from 103,000 km to 172,000 km. All images are from the Solar System Simulator beginning with April 5 @ 21:00 and ending on April 6 @ 00:25. Time interval between images in the sequence is 5 minutes and the movie was created using Photoshop's 'flipbook' option and uploaded to YouTube. The field of view on these images is 2.0 degrees to better approximate the FOV that the Cassini cameras will be seeing. Images are rotated so N is at top.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNZJUHxLjag

An exciting hour of Cassini observations may have been imaged on April 8th at 00:00 UTC to 01:05 UTC. Hopefully we will get to see the Rhea transit of Titan as predicted by the SSS below.
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Some nice raw images of Titan from April 8th have arrived! These are post T67 flyby from about 2.05M km. The images shown below display the CL1 UV3 filter (high altitude detached haze layer, N polar hood, N00153029) and the CL1 CB3 filter revealing the surface features (N00153027) that are mapped to a Celestia grid.
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Cool. Quite distinct here as a collar (cf Voyager 2, 1981) rather than the 'solid' hood we've seen up to now
with Cassini (cf Voyager 1)....

With this, and VIMS evidence that the north-south hemispheric boundary has recently shifted that Jason Barnes
showed at the Titan Through Time workshop last week suggests Titan is now entering its most rapid period
of seasonal change.....

Monsoon season approaching?

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/imag...9/N00153157.jpg

Pretty

In case you were wondering where the T67 images were:

From: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-124

I was wondering, yes. Too polite to ask. Thanks.

Was it a reset of the cameras or the spacecraft computers? The release leaves it unclear.

It was the camera. I believe VIMS got their data at least. Everything seems to be fine now, as you can see, though I will admit holding my breath a bit waiting for the Dione images...

Wow, I don't remember the last time just the camera reset. I assume it was an automatic recovery after reset, not ground operator action?

Yup -- VIMS data arrived without any problems.

The loss of ISS data is really disappointing, though, especially for this flyby for which they did all of the planning. It would have been great to compare our views.

- Jason

Hey Sunspot where did you get that image? I don't find it in raws on the Cassini site and the sequence apprears interrupted and not include that image. Also there are captions for images of Saturn that say the camera was pointed at Titan? Suppose all because of the reset issue noted in above posts.

Huh? http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/photos/raw/rawi...?imageID=215708

Great. Am now on the same page as everyone else! Thanks ugordan !!

[quote name='rlorenz' date='Apr 11 2010, 05:14 PM' post='158416']
Cool. Quite distinct here as a collar (cf Voyager 2, 1981) rather than the 'solid' hood we've seen up to now
with Cassini (cf Voyager 1)....


Here's a side by side comparison of the T67 and Voyager 2 images along with the approximate position of Saturn in its orbit at the time of the photos illustrating this.
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Raw images from April 20 include a nice view of Titan and Dione. Shown below is a composite color enhanced version of N00153329 rotated so north is up and matched up with the SSS version of the conjunction. (... just had to edit this after seeing others beautiful composites!)
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I meant to do an image release on this, but never got around to it. Now that the data are public, I figured I'd just post it here for now.

This is a great view of Titan on T67 from VIMS. What's good about it is that (1) entering northern spring, the north pole is illuminated and visible at the top -- you can see the dark north polar lake Kraken Mare; (2) it's not cloudy, and you can see all of the illuminated surface; and (3) VIMS coverage is pretty good (for us) and covers the full disk.

- Jason

Beautiful image!

What are the orange features just south of Kraken Mare? My very uneducated eye wants to make them into cumulus clouds.

Yes, a beautiful picture. Would be nice to get more northern coverage from VIMS now to fill in some blanks in the map.

Phil

Agree a great image and interesting to compare with a CL1 CB3 NAC image from the same flyby (even though a glitch prevented the planned NAC image sequence from closer in). Kraken can be glimpsed in the NAC image (center below, black arrow) taken a few days later from a greater distance (2.05M km). Another interesting region to compare is S Senkyo (red arrow). The pre-T72 storm appearance of Senkyo in VIMS and the April 2010 NAC is concordant as far as bright and dark surface features (red arrow). Post storm changes were noted in the NAC images (center compared with right image, red arrows) and I am very curious whether VIMS had post-storm images that showed changes in this area. (or in Belet for that matter)?
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Thanks, Jason --that is a great view of Titan! I love how Kraken mare shows so clearly.