Is That Saturn's Moon Titan or Utah?

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http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-078

Is That Saturn's Moon Titan or Utah?
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
March 04, 2010

Planetary scientists have been puzzling for years over the honeycomb
patterns and flat valleys with squiggly edges evident in radar images of
Saturn's moon Titan. Now, working with a "volunteer researcher" who has
put his own spin on data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, they have found
some recognizable analogies to a type of spectacular terrain on Earth
known as karst topography. A poster session today, Thursday, March 4, at
the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas,
displays their work.

Karst terrain on Earth occurs when water dissolves layers of bedrock,
leaving dramatic rock outcroppings and sinkholes. Comparing images of
White Canyon in Utah, the Darai Hills of Papua New Guinea, and Guangxi
Province in China to an area of connected valleys and ridges on Titan
known as Sikun Labyrinthus yields eerie similarities. The materials may
be different - liquid methane and ethane on Titan instead of water, and
probably some slurry of organic molecules on Titan instead of rock - but
the processes are likely quite similar.

"Even though Titan is an alien world with much lower temperatures, we
keep learning how many similarities there are to Earth," said Karl
Mitchell, a Cassini radar team associate at NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "The karst-like landscape suggests there
is a lot happening right now under the surface that we can't see."

Indeed, Mitchell said, if the karst landscape on Titan is consistent
with Earth's, there could very well be caves under the Titan surface.

Work on these analogies was spearheaded by Mike Malaska of Chapel Hill,
N.C., an organic chemist by trade and a contributor in his spare time to
unmannedspaceflight.com, a Web site for amateur space enthusiasts to try
their hand at visualizing NASA data. Malaska approached radar team
member Jani Radebaugh at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, about
collaborative work after meeting her at last year's Lunar and Planetary
Science Conference.

"I've been in love with Titan since Cassini beamed down the first images
of Titan's Shangri-La sand sea," Malaska said. "It's been amazing for
the public to see data come down so quickly and get data sets so rich
that you can practically imagine riding along with the spacecraft."

Radebaugh steered Malaska toward a swath of landscape imaged by the
radar instrument on Dec. 20, 2007. Malaska traced out patterns in the
landscape on his computer and classified them into different types of
valley patterns. He saw that some of the valleys had no apparent outlets
and wondered where the fluid and material went.

Searching geological literature, he found that such closed valleys were
typical of karst terrain and was led to examples of karst in Papua New
Guinea, Indonesia, Utah and China. He pulled down images of these places
from Google Earth. He got input from other Cassini team members and
associates, including Ralph Lorenz of the Johns Hopkins University
Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., and Tom Farr of JPL.

Malaska also wanted to make 3-D images and an animation of the area, so
he collaborated with Bjorn Jonsson and Doug Ellison, two other
"volunteer researchers" involved with the Web site. Malaska used a ruddy
color palette derived from Cassini's imaging science subsystem and the
descent imaging and spectral radiometer on the European Space Agency's
Huygens probe. He also used some artistic license to model the
elevations of the ridges and dendritic drainage basins, taking as his
basic assumption that liquid flows downward.

"My artistic model seems to fit the current data," Malaska said. "Of
course, Cassini could do another pass and blow the model away. I'm
hoping it will be confirmed, though."

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the
European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL manages the
Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The
Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The radar
instrument was built by JPL and the Italian Space Agency, working with
team members from the United States and several European countries.

Jia-Rui C. Cook 818-354-0850
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
jia-rui...@jpl.nasa.gov

2010-078