Post by starbux on Nov 8, 2005 16:36:33 GMT -6
I came across this website from another discussion group. It makes for good reading. I am reproducing the start page here www.saers.com/~craig/titan/
Welcome to Living Titan web site
by Craig Carmichael, independent researcher
Copyright 2005 Craig Carmichael
Chapters
1. Introduction to Titan [below]
* Introduction
* Titan facts table
* Bibliography/Links
* Foreword: About Living Titan website
2. Interpreting Huygens Image Data
* artifacts, blobs, etc, versus real image data
* What's in the view in Huygens image scenes?
* Notes on Image Colorizations
3. The Land on Titan
* Not much here, really, and it's geologically inaccurate - A colorized mosaic: My first attempt to show the Titan people have been missing. I may fix it and add more to this chapter later.
4. The Seas on Titan
* are methane
* why ON TITAN liquid methane is highly transparent instead of dark (Huygens MRI & HRI even looked into the sea and saw what's there!)
* theoretical tidal forces on Titan
* no major oceans, but shallow methane seas almost ring the equator
* tidal forces and tidal flows dictate the equatorial geography of the seas and the channels that connect them
* Will Cassini view any one sea at 0º, 90º, 180º or 270º longitude with hi-rez close-ups for comparison of sea levels at apoapsis and periapsis as independent evidence of tides and seas?
* a probable clockwise tidal circulation pattern between the North and South Saturn-facing seas ("The H"), creating two "deltas"
Huygens's landing Site
* Explores how all the instrument readings support (or don't contradict) the visually evident landing in a few cm or inches of very clear liquid methane facing a rocky shoal just a few feet away, and how many of the Huygens images show clearly that the sea they view could only be liquid.
5. Life on Titan
* Huygens Images: primitive giant aquatic plants
* Huygens Images: primitive aquatic animal life
* Huygens Images: giant vines growing from the sea and spreading over the land (The so-called "runway", so-called "rivers", and other vines, bright "islands" near shore are roots or stems.)
* Cassini images: aquatic plants dotting the sea and giant vines growing from the seas onto land
* Cassini VIMS: false color image seeming to show the Saturn seas (the "H") seemingly clogged with matts of aquatic plants (So that's why the seas don't reflect light very well!)
* My speculation about Titanian plant and animal life
* My speculation about Titanian evolution
Since its discovery by Christiaan Huygens in 1655, Titan has been a world mysterious to us. Not only its distance but its perpetual cloud layer has hidden its surface from both earthly eyes and space probe cameras. Now the Cassini mission to Saturn and the Huygens Titan lander have dimly lifted the veil and shown Titan to be a more interesting and exciting Planet than anybody imagined!
In some ways, Titan is remarkably Earthlike, and in others, very strange to us. Owing to the perpetual methane haze layers, on Titan we would see little direct sunlight or the stars at night, nor even beautiful Saturn which it orbits. Eyes adapted to the methane, however, would be able to see these sights. It has both land and sea areas as does the Earth. The land areas have hills and lakes; the sea areas have sand and gravel bars, tidal flats and shoals, as well as deeper areas. In the sky, occasional rain clouds form and then vanish - it would seem rain falls, though much less than on Earth. Along the equator, tidal flows rush back and forth between the Saturn -- anti-Saturn seas and the mid-longitude seas at right angles to Saturn over the course of each Titanian day, 16 Earth days long. Titan's 'water' is liquid methane (CH4): at Titan's 94 degree Kelvin temperatures, Earth's water (H2O ice) is just another kind of rock.
The atmosphere is just a little thicker than the Earth's (Huygens measured 1460 millibars) and composed mainly of the same gases, nitrogen and argon. It is the only other world in the solar system with an air pressure even remotely similar to Earth's. Oxygen, however, is absent, and water vapour is replaced by methane vapour.
Titan's gravity is only about 1/7 of the Earth's. This is even less than our moon's gravity (1/6) even though Titan is over three times the size of our moon, because Titan's core contains many lighter materials such as ice, and so it is less dense.
Titan Revealed!, at a methane-transparent wavelength (939 nm)
Center is 15º south and 156º west; Huygens landed at 12º S, 192º W.
The dark area is the Saturn antipodal sea. There appear to be shallows to the East of the islands, possibly silt in the lee of tidal flows. The bright sinewy region to the East of it has been dubbed "Xanadu". Clouds are seen near the South pole, which were gone on the next fly-by, probably having rained in the polar region. Darker features here and there may be lakes.
Titan Major Facts
Size 5150 Km Diameter; somewhat larger than Mercury; half the size of Mars; 1/15 the size of Earth (by volume). The total surface area is 16% of Earth's, or 3/5 of our Land area, or 83 million square Km.
Density 1.8 - about twice that of water. (Earth, the densest planet, is about 5.5.)
Atmosphere 1460 mBars or 21 PSI as measured by Huygens at sea level, 4.5 times as dense as Earth's air. (from Boyle's law of boiling: gas density=pressure/temperature, =1.46 bars / (93K/295K). ) Extends over 400 Km into space, ~88% Nitrogen, 5% Argon, 7%(?) Methane vapour, 0.2% H2 (figures are not exact)
Seas Liquid Methane (CH4). Strong tidal flows on a once-per-Titan-day cycle. (See The Seas on Titan)
Daytime Surface Temperature 93.65 +/- .25 degrees Kelvin, or -187 degrees Celsius as measured by Huygens at the surface.
Distance from Saturn
1.2 Gm (Giga-meters), slightly elliptical causing tides; Earth's moon is .4 Gm from Earth
Length of day 16 Earth days; Titan orbits gas-giant Saturn once in that time, and keeps the same face always towards Saturn.
Distance from Sun
1400 Gm (Giga-meters); Earth is 150 Gm
Year 30 Earth Years; Titan is 9.5 times as far from the sun as Earth
Inclination of Equator to the Sun (Seasons) 26-3/4 degrees (same as Saturn's rings); Earth 23-1/2 degrees
"Bibliography": Links to other sources of Titan information, or copies of those sources:
Sites associated with Cassini & Huygens Missions
* General Link to Cassini-Huygens mission at JPL/NASA: saturn.jpl.nasa.gov
* General Link to Cassini-Huygens at ESA: www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens
General links to Lunar and Planetary Laboratories sites
* Huygens Descent Imager & Radial Spectrometer site: www.lpl.arizona.edu/~kholso
* Cassini Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer site: wwwvims.lpl.arizona.edu
* Jason Perry's Titan Blog: volcanopele.blogspot.com/
Selected independent Titan exploration sites
* This page has links to many Titan images and information: anthony.liekens.net/huygens_static.html
* Some other people's considered thoughts on Titan: www.titanexploration.com/
* Here's a site concentrating on Titan chemistry: www.markelowitz.com/titan.htm
* René Pascal, Some fine Mosaics made from the Huygens images: www.beugungsbild.de/huygens/huygens.html
Foreword: ABOUT LIVING TITAN WEBSITE
My Titan studies started in March with disbelief of the astonishing conclusion that Huygens saw no liquid methane, when it is ubiquitous in the images and also was detected by the GCMS instrument when Huygens's landed "with a splat". The Huygens images now appear to have been cast aside with little attention ever having been paid to their fascinating content. When I point out interesting features in them, however clear those features seem, I am branded as having an "overactive imagination", but only once has an alternative view of a feature been offered, and it didn't seem to fit very well. (Neither did my original idea. Months later, after much study of many images, the true nature of that and other "linear" land features suddenly became clear.) On every other occasion, essentially the entire scene has been dismissed as "compression artifacts" or "poor viewing conditions" in an offhand and senseless way, perhaps because most of the scenes make little sense without recognition of the liquid methane. While it is easy to read into low-quality monochrome images things that aren't really there, the Huygens images and data, collected at great expense and effort from on Titan itself, are of adequate quality to reliably show the essential scenes and for serious study of those scenes, even if fine points of detail are sometimes ambiguous. Many features are seen several times as Huygens descends, providing independent checks on each other. Applicable Cassini images also very much correspond with Huygens images and support the model presented. In fact, no instrument readings or images I've been able to find actually contradict the views herein expressed: even with observations that appear to contradict each other, this scenario appears to explain why they might. While I certainly make no claim that every brush stroke is correct, I firmly believe I've painted an essentially true and comprehensive picture of the astonishing Real Titan.
Please send Titan questions, ideas or info, or ideas for site improvements, to: craig at saers dot com.
Copyright 2005 Craig Carmichael
Welcome to Living Titan web site
by Craig Carmichael, independent researcher
Copyright 2005 Craig Carmichael
Chapters
1. Introduction to Titan [below]
* Introduction
* Titan facts table
* Bibliography/Links
* Foreword: About Living Titan website
2. Interpreting Huygens Image Data
* artifacts, blobs, etc, versus real image data
* What's in the view in Huygens image scenes?
* Notes on Image Colorizations
3. The Land on Titan
* Not much here, really, and it's geologically inaccurate - A colorized mosaic: My first attempt to show the Titan people have been missing. I may fix it and add more to this chapter later.
4. The Seas on Titan
* are methane
* why ON TITAN liquid methane is highly transparent instead of dark (Huygens MRI & HRI even looked into the sea and saw what's there!)
* theoretical tidal forces on Titan
* no major oceans, but shallow methane seas almost ring the equator
* tidal forces and tidal flows dictate the equatorial geography of the seas and the channels that connect them
* Will Cassini view any one sea at 0º, 90º, 180º or 270º longitude with hi-rez close-ups for comparison of sea levels at apoapsis and periapsis as independent evidence of tides and seas?
* a probable clockwise tidal circulation pattern between the North and South Saturn-facing seas ("The H"), creating two "deltas"
Huygens's landing Site
* Explores how all the instrument readings support (or don't contradict) the visually evident landing in a few cm or inches of very clear liquid methane facing a rocky shoal just a few feet away, and how many of the Huygens images show clearly that the sea they view could only be liquid.
5. Life on Titan
* Huygens Images: primitive giant aquatic plants
* Huygens Images: primitive aquatic animal life
* Huygens Images: giant vines growing from the sea and spreading over the land (The so-called "runway", so-called "rivers", and other vines, bright "islands" near shore are roots or stems.)
* Cassini images: aquatic plants dotting the sea and giant vines growing from the seas onto land
* Cassini VIMS: false color image seeming to show the Saturn seas (the "H") seemingly clogged with matts of aquatic plants (So that's why the seas don't reflect light very well!)
* My speculation about Titanian plant and animal life
* My speculation about Titanian evolution
Since its discovery by Christiaan Huygens in 1655, Titan has been a world mysterious to us. Not only its distance but its perpetual cloud layer has hidden its surface from both earthly eyes and space probe cameras. Now the Cassini mission to Saturn and the Huygens Titan lander have dimly lifted the veil and shown Titan to be a more interesting and exciting Planet than anybody imagined!
In some ways, Titan is remarkably Earthlike, and in others, very strange to us. Owing to the perpetual methane haze layers, on Titan we would see little direct sunlight or the stars at night, nor even beautiful Saturn which it orbits. Eyes adapted to the methane, however, would be able to see these sights. It has both land and sea areas as does the Earth. The land areas have hills and lakes; the sea areas have sand and gravel bars, tidal flats and shoals, as well as deeper areas. In the sky, occasional rain clouds form and then vanish - it would seem rain falls, though much less than on Earth. Along the equator, tidal flows rush back and forth between the Saturn -- anti-Saturn seas and the mid-longitude seas at right angles to Saturn over the course of each Titanian day, 16 Earth days long. Titan's 'water' is liquid methane (CH4): at Titan's 94 degree Kelvin temperatures, Earth's water (H2O ice) is just another kind of rock.
The atmosphere is just a little thicker than the Earth's (Huygens measured 1460 millibars) and composed mainly of the same gases, nitrogen and argon. It is the only other world in the solar system with an air pressure even remotely similar to Earth's. Oxygen, however, is absent, and water vapour is replaced by methane vapour.
Titan's gravity is only about 1/7 of the Earth's. This is even less than our moon's gravity (1/6) even though Titan is over three times the size of our moon, because Titan's core contains many lighter materials such as ice, and so it is less dense.
Titan Revealed!, at a methane-transparent wavelength (939 nm)
Center is 15º south and 156º west; Huygens landed at 12º S, 192º W.
The dark area is the Saturn antipodal sea. There appear to be shallows to the East of the islands, possibly silt in the lee of tidal flows. The bright sinewy region to the East of it has been dubbed "Xanadu". Clouds are seen near the South pole, which were gone on the next fly-by, probably having rained in the polar region. Darker features here and there may be lakes.
Titan Major Facts
Size 5150 Km Diameter; somewhat larger than Mercury; half the size of Mars; 1/15 the size of Earth (by volume). The total surface area is 16% of Earth's, or 3/5 of our Land area, or 83 million square Km.
Density 1.8 - about twice that of water. (Earth, the densest planet, is about 5.5.)
Atmosphere 1460 mBars or 21 PSI as measured by Huygens at sea level, 4.5 times as dense as Earth's air. (from Boyle's law of boiling: gas density=pressure/temperature, =1.46 bars / (93K/295K). ) Extends over 400 Km into space, ~88% Nitrogen, 5% Argon, 7%(?) Methane vapour, 0.2% H2 (figures are not exact)
Seas Liquid Methane (CH4). Strong tidal flows on a once-per-Titan-day cycle. (See The Seas on Titan)
Daytime Surface Temperature 93.65 +/- .25 degrees Kelvin, or -187 degrees Celsius as measured by Huygens at the surface.
Distance from Saturn
1.2 Gm (Giga-meters), slightly elliptical causing tides; Earth's moon is .4 Gm from Earth
Length of day 16 Earth days; Titan orbits gas-giant Saturn once in that time, and keeps the same face always towards Saturn.
Distance from Sun
1400 Gm (Giga-meters); Earth is 150 Gm
Year 30 Earth Years; Titan is 9.5 times as far from the sun as Earth
Inclination of Equator to the Sun (Seasons) 26-3/4 degrees (same as Saturn's rings); Earth 23-1/2 degrees
"Bibliography": Links to other sources of Titan information, or copies of those sources:
Sites associated with Cassini & Huygens Missions
* General Link to Cassini-Huygens mission at JPL/NASA: saturn.jpl.nasa.gov
* General Link to Cassini-Huygens at ESA: www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens
General links to Lunar and Planetary Laboratories sites
* Huygens Descent Imager & Radial Spectrometer site: www.lpl.arizona.edu/~kholso
* Cassini Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer site: wwwvims.lpl.arizona.edu
* Jason Perry's Titan Blog: volcanopele.blogspot.com/
Selected independent Titan exploration sites
* This page has links to many Titan images and information: anthony.liekens.net/huygens_static.html
* Some other people's considered thoughts on Titan: www.titanexploration.com/
* Here's a site concentrating on Titan chemistry: www.markelowitz.com/titan.htm
* René Pascal, Some fine Mosaics made from the Huygens images: www.beugungsbild.de/huygens/huygens.html
Foreword: ABOUT LIVING TITAN WEBSITE
My Titan studies started in March with disbelief of the astonishing conclusion that Huygens saw no liquid methane, when it is ubiquitous in the images and also was detected by the GCMS instrument when Huygens's landed "with a splat". The Huygens images now appear to have been cast aside with little attention ever having been paid to their fascinating content. When I point out interesting features in them, however clear those features seem, I am branded as having an "overactive imagination", but only once has an alternative view of a feature been offered, and it didn't seem to fit very well. (Neither did my original idea. Months later, after much study of many images, the true nature of that and other "linear" land features suddenly became clear.) On every other occasion, essentially the entire scene has been dismissed as "compression artifacts" or "poor viewing conditions" in an offhand and senseless way, perhaps because most of the scenes make little sense without recognition of the liquid methane. While it is easy to read into low-quality monochrome images things that aren't really there, the Huygens images and data, collected at great expense and effort from on Titan itself, are of adequate quality to reliably show the essential scenes and for serious study of those scenes, even if fine points of detail are sometimes ambiguous. Many features are seen several times as Huygens descends, providing independent checks on each other. Applicable Cassini images also very much correspond with Huygens images and support the model presented. In fact, no instrument readings or images I've been able to find actually contradict the views herein expressed: even with observations that appear to contradict each other, this scenario appears to explain why they might. While I certainly make no claim that every brush stroke is correct, I firmly believe I've painted an essentially true and comprehensive picture of the astonishing Real Titan.
Please send Titan questions, ideas or info, or ideas for site improvements, to: craig at saers dot com.
Copyright 2005 Craig Carmichael
