Hello,

This is my first post but I’m a long time reader, so it might be best to give a little background detail first. I'm a student studying geography and physics at university and I’m about to write a paper comparing the river channels on Titan to dryland areas on Earth.

I was just wondering if anyone could share a good place to get primary data from? I Have been using Titan RADAR SAR Swaths so far, which is very helpful, but I was hoping to for more recent fly-bys.

Thanks for any help that you might give,

Stuart Gilmore

http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/

[quote name='Stuart.Gilmore' date='Sep 24 2010, 09:37 AM' post='164481']

I was just wondering if anyone could share a good place to get primary data from? I Have been using Titan RADAR SAR Swaths so far, which is very helpful, but I was hoping to for more recent fly-bys.

You might pick up some ideas and sources from this article posted by Emily recently:
http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002542/

PDS Imaging Node, as Ted said. More specifically, http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/volumes/radar.html which has a bit of description for each data volume about what each contains. You want SAR imagery. Explore the data volumes; there are readme files and documentation that can explain to you how to open it.

To actually manipulate the SAR RADAR data and project onto a sphere, you'll need to use ISIS or you can use the released data and figure small scale features won't be too distorted.

Most of the channel networks have been manually traced out from SAR RADAR data. I think there's been some recent efforts by some folks to use the RADAR data and automated processing with ARC-GIS with some specialized programming.

Check out the work by Devon Burr (mentioned in Emily's post above) and some other work by Ralf Jaumann and colleagues and some published traces done by Ralph Lorenz et al. (I used the manual method when tracing out and assigning the valley and channel networks in the Sikun Labyrinthus region, I initially used the publicly available image PIA08399)

A really nice description of the method is in a thesis done by Richard Cartwright "Analysis of Channel Networks and the Potential for Sediment Transport in the Vicinity of the North Polar Seas of Titan" freely available here: http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/geosciences_theses/20/
The thesis compared some Titan north polar networks to terrestrial networks in Oman and in central Nevada using Google Earth imagery.

Thanks for posting that link to the channel networks thesis Mike. (If it was posted before then I missed it.)

Thank you for all the responses that you have given, this information should prove very useful to me (sorry for the time it took to reply, i have been out of the country).

The work by Richard Cartwright is very similar to the methods i will be undertaking, and has managed to clear up a few of my issues. so thanks for adding that. I will be using an Arc-GIS program to trace the streams, so i'll keep you posted as to how it pans out.