**NASA**

**October 26, 2004**

**1:00 p.m. CDT**

(Poor audio made transcription difficult.)

Coordinator This is the operator. I'd like to remind parties today's
conference is being recorded. You may begin, ma'am.

T. Ray Thank you very much. For those of you who are not intimately
involved with the mission on a daily basis, today is a very exciting day
on the Cassini-Huygens mission. We are actually, even as we speak, the
spacecraft is executing the first Titan Close flyby and it's going to be
a really terrific day. It just so happens that our CHARM telecon's are
set up on the last Tuesday of the month, and it just so happens the last
Tuesday of October is the first Titan flyby, so we knew what we were
talking about today for a long time. To give you an update on the
spacecraft, the last time we had any contact with it was just prior to
the Titan segment executing, so we had a down link yesterday. Everything
was fine, in fact we returned two days worth of Titan movies that are,
even as we speak, being assembled into a Titan movie that hopefully will
be released later on today. This is one of the best approach type movies
that we'll do in the whole mission, because the phase of Titan is so
low.

The spacecraft was healthy. We are dealing with rain in Spain, we're
down linking all this data over the deep space network (DSN) complex in
Madrid, Spain, and rain will affect the data return. We have light rain
right now, and that means we'll have small data dropouts during the down
link. Hopefully, we will stay at light rain, if it turns into heavy
rain, then we lose the down link.

> Just so that you know, we are not playing the data back twice. It was
> decided early in the mission, as a policy and which makes sense, that
> we have 45 Titan flybys and so no one flyby is so unique that we would
> sacrifice other science, and the spacecraft is headed from Titan into
> Saturn periapse, the closest it will get to Saturn on this orbit, and
> the ring scientists and the Saturn scientists are filling up the solid
> state recorder tomorrow and the day after, so we don't have the
> ability to hold all the Titan data on there and we'd have to let them
> not do any science at all. So that's the policy. Of course we make
> these policies when we're all feeling very comfortable and happy, and
> now that we're sitting there looking dead in the eye of rain in Spain,
> we're all thinking: why did we do that? But that's what we did.
> There's a good reason for it, and so now what you do is you just say,
> I myself, personally, my background is astronomy, so I can't tell you
> how many times I wrote a proposal, got time on the telescope and got
> clouded out. So I'm taking this a little bit better than some of the
> other guys and gals who are planetary scientists and are used to this,
> you know, every time you take an observation you get the data back.
>
> But anyway, that's our situation. The current weather forecast in
> Madrid is light rain, which will mean small data drop-outs. Tonight at
> 6:30 p.m. Pacific Time is when the down link will start and playback
> the Titan data, and there will be a live NASA show for those of you
> who have NASA's select TV, and if not, if you have Internet connection
> they do a live Web broadcast.

M How much help is the 34-meter at Goldstone going to be?

T. Ray The 34-meter at Goldstone is over the last 45 minutes of the
flyby, and what we did there is, the question that we ask ourselves when
we do a double playback is, is there any data that is so unique that we
can't get it at one of the other 45 flybys. For TA there is, there's an
observation where we actually sample the upper fringes of Titan's
atmosphere, and this observation is critical to the Huygens mission for
getting some information to feed into the Titan atmospheric model that
they're using for the Huygens mission, but also for subsequent Titan
flybys where we take the spacecraft down 950. That data was deemed
critical and we're playing it back over two stations, over two
complexes. Now, of course, for those of you who live in southern
California, you realize it's raining here today also, so we have rain in
Spain and we have rain at Goldstone. The only data, though, that's
coming back over Goldstone is that central ion and neutral mass
spectrometer (INMS) data and the associated attitude articulation system
data, so we will not be able to play back any of the science data.

So we have three presentations today. We have an overview by myself, and
then we have two of our Titan scientists joining us today: Dr. Kevin
Baines is a scientist with the visual and infrared mapping spectrometer
(VIMS) ; and Dr. Connor Nixon is with composite and infrared
spectrometer (CIRS). This really terrific because both of them are
atmospheric specialists, so if you have questions about the atmosphere
of Titan, if these two guys can't answer it, well then it probably can't
be answered. Also, of course all of us are pretty savvy about the
surface stuff. The first presentation today is an overview presentation
by myself and my name is Trina Ray and I'm one of the lead science
planning engineers for the Titan Orbiter science team. Our group planned
all of the science that happened at the Titan flybys and TA was mine. I
was the lead for this one, so by golly, I know this one backwards and
forwards. So we're going to do the overview presentation first and also
if you have not downloaded the movie, I recommend that you start now,
because when everybody who's on the telecon tries to download it, it's
going to slow down, so it will take a while to get everybody having a
download.

Let's go ahead and start with a Titan-A preview. If you go to page two,
I've put some facts there for everybody. This is the information about
every flyby that we like to collect. What is the altitude that we're
flying by? The altitude is 1,200 kilometers, which is about 746 miles.
For those of you who are familiar with the T0 distant flyby that we did
right after SOI and the fabulous images we got back from that, that was
a 350,000 kilometer flyby, and we are at 1,200 today. So this one today
is going to be spectacular. The closest approach time was today at
15:30, which was 8:30 a.m. Pacific Time. We flyby at 6.1 kilometers per
second, which is about 14,000 miles an hour, and the phase, which is the
angle between where the sun hits the planet and gets to the spacecraft
is very low in bounds, so that means we have a nice full moon, a nice
full phase coming in, and it gets to 91 degrees at closest approach and
then it's high on the way out, we're looking at the ... on the way out.

We are on thrusters on this flyby. As I mentioned before, we are
sampling the upper fringes of Titan's atmosphere, and so we need to get
the mission requirement that we be on thrusters when that happens. Every
Titan flyby has the same philosophy, you clear out the solid state
recorded beforehand and you pack it with Titan data as you go by. We
filled the recorder every time, and so we'll be returning 3.4 gigabits
on this particular flyby, and again, that down link starts at 6:30 p.m.
to 3:30 a.m. tomorrow.

The science highlights for the Titan-A are, we have an inbound set of
movies that were just fabulous. That data is already on the ground and
I've seen some of the process images, they're phenomenal. The inbound
movies, we're looking for cloud motion and wind speed and they're really
terrific. Hopefully they'll be releasing the movie later on today, but
of course you can go to the http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov Web site and you
can see the raw images. If you just click on look at Titan latest data,
and you can see the raw images that were down linked yesterday, and they
are really terrific.

Always we like to mention with the science highlights what are the
first. We have the first In Situ sampling of Titan's atmosphere. This is
that ion and neutral mass spectrometer. We're going to sniff just the
upper, upper fringes of Titan's atmosphere, and that's going to be
terrific. They probably won't be showing images, I mean, you can't show
an image of the spacecraft sniffing, but there will be something about
that in the press conferences over the next few days, because that's
really an important observation.

> We have the first crossing through Titan's plasma wake. Saturn is
> enshrouded in a giant magnetic bubble, and Titan is at the outer edges
> of the bubble. We passed the bow shock about ten hours ago, and so we
> should be inside Saturn's magnetosphere, but the solar wind is really
> buffeting the magnetosphere right now and so it was a very unusual
> crossing. So all the magnetospheric guys are going crazy trying to
> figure out if we're going to be inside the magnetosphere or outside
> the magnetosphere for the Titan flyby. I just heard from the PI, from
> the mag instrument about an hour ago, that their best estimates are
> that we'll cross the magneto-sheath about half an hour before closest
> approach, which is just like oh, my God, it's so close it's going to
> be crazy. So that will make for great science, though, later on. Just
> to give you an advertisement for our next CHARM telecon on the last
> Tuesday in November, is all about the magnetosphere, so that will be a
> good one for us.
>
> We'll also have the first medium and high resolution imaging of Titan.
> Again, the images that you've seen so far were a flyby at 350,000
> kilometers, and we'll be at 1,200 kilometers, so we will be getting
> some really high-resolution imaging. We've got several instruments
> that we know can see to the surface. The camera has a filter that sees
> to the surface, and the visual and infrared mapping spectrometer can
> pick wavelengths that will get right to the surface, so we have
> several cameras on board that can see to the surface. We will be
> looking for fluid features, lakes, rivers, everything. Titan is a very
> mysterious surface and we're just now getting a chance to look at it
> really good, so it's kind of like the way we were looking at Mars in
> the '70s, the maps and surfaces that we had of Mars in the '70s is
> pretty much where we're going to be tonight after the Titan flyby.
>
> We have the first synthetic aperture radar imaging. This is another
> imager of the surface where we can scan a radar beam across the
> surface and get an echo back. We will have Scatterometry of the
> Huygens landing site and we will have optical remote sensing of the
> Huygens landing site, but we will not have SAR of the Huygens landing
> site, we will just have Scatterometry. So the RADAR observations are
> going to be terrific. Those won't be flowing to the down link tonight
> because you have to process the RADAR data, so that will take some
> time.
>
> Of course all of the instruments are involved in looking at the
> atmosphere.
>
> Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, is the only moon with a really
> significant atmosphere. The atmosphere is one and a half times as
> thick as the atmosphere you're breathing right now; it's 80% nitrogen,
> just like the atmosphere you're breathing right now, and it's got some
> other things in it, though, like methane. It's very cold, so that
> would be the difference between the one you're breathing right now,
> but it's a thick, thick atmosphere for a moon. All of the optical
> remote sensing instruments are going to spend a lot of time trying to
> figure out the atmosphere of Titan, that's definitely a prime target.
>
> Then finally, of course we do want to study this interaction between
> Saturn's magnetosphere and Titan, which is terrific. We want to know
> if Titan has its own magnetic field, an internal magnetic field, we
> want to look at just everything we possibly can about the
> magnetosphere of Titan.
>
> Page three of the overview, is a trajectory, so let me give you a
> chance at---what's going on here, if you start at the far right hand
> side, you see a green line coming in from the right, this was as we
> approached Saturn on our approach last July. You see that the green
> line swoops around Saturn, that was our Saturn Orbit Insertion
> maneuver that happened on July 1^st^ of this year. Then we have this
> big first loop, which is what we've been doing since July, and a big
> maneuver out there. Also, on the right-hand side you can see where
> there's---it isn't a perfect circle, way up there on the right hand
> side there's that green line that bends a little bit, that's where we
> did our big Periapse Raise maneuver which targeted Titan, and as you
> come in there you see that we're going to encounter Titan today, so
> that's the trajectory overview, that's page three.
>
> On page four we have the observation overview of what's happening in
> the 24-hours around the Titan flyby. This is pretty typical of a Titan
> flyby. We do some sort of down link to clear off the solid state
> recorder and then we have dead-time, which you see there just above
> the pink. This is so that we can adjust the timing of all these
> observations if we end up getting to Titan a little bit earlier or
> later than when we had planned the observations a year ago. So we
> always have the ability to move things around a little bit. As we
> approach Titan when we're far away, we always are doing the optical
> remote sensing observation, we're doing movies, we're doing medium
> resolution imaging, we're doing Sit-and-stares at the Limb, while
> we're doing scans across the disk, as Titan slowly grows in our field
> of view. So you can see there we've got begin medium resolution
> observations, begin high-res observations, and then, because this is a
> Titan flyby, where we are close enough that we're actually sampling
> the upper fringes of Titan's atmosphere, we're required to be on
> thrusters, so we transition to thruster control. We'll be doing that
> as we image the Huygens landing site, we'll actually set up the
> Huygens landing site and then transition the thrusters there. So we'll
> image the Huygens landing site for the 20 minutes of the transition to
> thrusters.
>
> Then we turn the High Gain Antenna to Titan to begin some RADAR
> Scatterometry observations, and we only do that for a little while
> before we go back to cameras to Titan to get some of the highest Res.,
> but of course this is when we're on thrusters, so we move the
> spacecraft very quickly but we have to take very short exposures
> during this time. Then we turn the spacecraft so that the Ion and
> neutral mass spectrometer is in the direction where we're moving, so
> that as we're skimming to the upper atmosphere of Titan we are
> sampling that, so we have to put that detector in the direction that
> we're moving. That's the INMS to Titan RAM direction there that you
> see at the bottom of that first block of pink. Then we have the
> closest approach, and then we flip the spacecraft over and we go High
> Gain Antenna to Titan again, and we do all the RADAR high-res. SAR and
> low-res. SAR, and then finish out with RADAR altimetry, which is a
> sonar sounding altitude finder, and then we finish out with RADAR
> Scatterometry, where they're sweeping across the surface.
>
> Then we go and do a little bit more Cameras to Titan, which is---oh,
> right, right---sorry, in the middle of that we transition back to
> wheels, don't forget we only have to be on thrusters right at closest
> approach, and then we do a little bit more---they're missing a line
> there at the bottom, that last thing of pink should say, "Begin RADAR
> radiometry," and then it should go on to say "Do a UVIS upper
> atmosphere scan," but it looks like they've missed that. Then we
> finish out with a dead-time this is our matching dead-time so that we
> can slide the Titan flyby one way or the other harmlessly, and then we
> begin the data playback.
>
> Now, we do have a movie of this, so if everybody would exit out of the
> presentation and get the movie set up, so go ahead and get the movie
> set up and I'll tell you when to start it, so don't start it yet. Then
> I'll talk through it. We'll do this twice so don't panic, we'll go
> ahead and do it twice.

M Trina, can I ask you a quick question?

T. Ray Absolutely.

M I've got pages one and three, and the pictures aren't coming up, and I
get a Quick Time and a TIF uncompressed/decompressed message.

T. Ray Pages one and three?

M Yeah

M I switched from the PowerPoint to the PDF and it's there.

T. Ray Okay, so if anybody's having problems with the PowerPoint, if you
go ahead and switch to the PDF right now. I still will go ahead and try
to fix those pages for the PowerPoint and get them fixed, either e-mail
them out individually or update the Web site.

M I'd appreciate that. That's typically an area you see that's made on a
Macintosh and then viewed on a PC.

T. Ray Oh, yes, I made it on a Macintosh, that's a true statement. So
everybody get the movie set up, don't hit play yet.

M The problem I see is that I have one telephone line and I'm using it
for the phone, so if you continue with descriptions I'll follow you, but
otherwise I can't.

T. Ray Well, we'll be careful and describe things a bit better for those
of you who are PowerPoint challenged because of my "Mac-ness".

Let's go ahead. I'm going to count down. We'll start the movie and I'll
go ahead and talk you through it. This is essentially what we just
talked about in the timeline, but it's visual and it's really a super
movie, so 3-2-1 and then hit play. So, 3-2-1: play. The first thing you
see is a spacecraft turning and then we've got just a little bit of
imaging right at the beginning and now we have a CIRS scan back and
forth. They're scanning and they go off the planet so that they get dark
skies and they want to cover the whole thing. The CIRS is the red
circles. Now, the white squares are imaging going back and forth, and
then back to the red circles of CIRS, and you see they're starting at
the limb and then going off to deep space, and then the big red square
is VIMS and you see Titan growing and growing and at some point VIMS is
going to have to do a 3x2 mosaic. They do the 3x2 mosaic and then the
imaging starts doing their medium resolution, their scanning as fast as
they can, to get everything that they can and it's getting better,
better, and then they set up on a Huygens landing site for the
transmission. The green cone is RADAR going back and forth, and then you
see that green trail that was left over is a trail of the high res. SAR.
Then as Titan recedes, you see the green beam sweeping back and forth
and back and forth, and that's the RADAR Scatterometry, and then finally
you've got the blue UVIS slit as we do the upper atmosphere observation,
and then we end with the down link to Goldstone, which has a pink line
coming out of the high gain antenna.

> So go ahead and hit play again, because really it takes more than once
> to take this movie in. We'll go 3-2-1: play. So you start with a quick
> set of pictures and then CIRS is sweeping back and forth, always going
> off the limb so that they get a good, dark sky. CIRS has a couple of
> fields of views, so that's why it looks like there are two cones
> coming out, and then the camera comes back the white squares. CIRS is
> doing a long limb integration, they go off for a deep space and then
> come back, very few images during that. Then VIMS takes over and they
> just integrate and integrate and integrate for hours, and then finally
> Titan grows so big they have to do a 3x2 mosaic. Then the camera comes
> back after the 3x2 mosaic, and the little white square is sweeping as
> fast as it can and then it's going to sit on the Huygens landing site
> as we do the transition, then RADAR zoom-zoom-zoom with the green
> sweeping things. Then we have some high-res. VIMS right at closest
> approach, then the RADAR SAR, which leaves the green trail, and then
> the RADAR sweeping is the Scatterometry, they sweep in both
> directions, you saw the spacecraft spin, and then we finish up with
> the UVIS upper atmosphere observation, and you can see we've put a
> blue ring around Titan, which is how you get to see Titan, with this
> big, huge atmosphere.
>
> Now, is that the most awesome movie? Can you believe how cool that
> movie is? It's done by one of the guys here at JPL. He does it for
> fun. I saw it last week and I was so impressed. I said, we've got to
> get this out to the public it' s so terrific, and so it got released
> on the ISS Web site yesterday and we're getting it on the Cassini Web
> site today. This is done with a program called SOAP, which is a
> program available here at JPL, and I think you might even be able to
> get it yourself, but this is really a deep level of geekdom here.

D. McClelland This is Dee McClelland. I'm a solar system educator in
Minnesota, and I just wanted to tell you thank you for that. I used that
movie today in my classes and I talked through it, not as good as you
did, and we did an activity with it, and it was really great. So thank
you for that.

T. Ray You're welcome, Dee. I tell you, it really is a good movie, isn't
it?

D. McClelland Yes.

T. Ray The two guys who worked on it really hard were Earl Maize, he's
the deputy project manager, and he's a geek, like all of us; and then
Nathan Strange, who's one of the navigators. These guys did it for fun.
They started using this program SOAP to do some studies, and they just
got so good at it that they just put these movies out for fun, and I was
blown away when I saw it.

D. McClelland Tell them thank you, and we're putting it to good use.

T. Ray Absolutely. Back to the overview, page five. This is the press
conference schedule, for those of you who have access to NASA TV or NASA
Select, or if you don't, these are all Webcasts. There will be a live
show tonight starting at 6:30 p.m. to midnight, which will show just a
live feed of every image, we're taking over 400 images and every image,
as it comes down, there would just be live commentary until we get the
closest approach, at which point you saw RADAR took over and then they
stopped the live show, because RADAR you can't show the images right
away, it takes a long time to process them. So that starts at 6:30
tonight, Pacific Time. The next press conference will be tomorrow
morning, because of course we'll all have stayed up all night working
with the data. We'll all be completely coherent and caffeinated, and so
we'll have a quick look of the first process images from VIMS and
hopefully RADAR, and even INMS, at 9:00 to 10:00 a.m. tomorrow, Pacific
Time, and then some live satellite interviews also from noon to four,
and then Thursday from 9:00 to 10:00 a.m. there will be another press
conference, which now everybody will have had a day to look at their
data and process it and talk to their colleagues, and so 9:00 to 10:00
a.m. on Thursday Pacific Time is that press conference.

The next slide is page six. For those of you who want to follow the data
playback, I've thrown it into this document here. But also, I just
realized that the pages that you guys are having problems with; one,
three and probably six and seven, would also be available on the
Saturn.jpl.nasa.gov Web site. It's called the TA Mission description.
It's a booklet of 20 pages or so and I extracted this information from
that.

> So for those of you who are going to be following in real-time
> tonight, you can see that it's just a list of the observations and the
> ISS observations, which is the data that will be flowing live tonight,
> or highlighted in black, and you can see they start out with those ten
> pictures right at the beginning, then as CIRS does their stuff they
> sort of just take a few wide-angle camera pictures and then they do
> that first set, where they sweep across and do the monitor, they have
> sixty-three NACs and six WACs, that's how to read that over in that
> second to the last column. Then, as CIRS goes back to do that limb
> scan, where they just sit and integrate for several hours, they're
> just taking seven WACs during that time and then as VIMS comes on,
> you've got the 12 and 36, and then as ISS is doing that rapid, rapid,
> you remember the white box sweeping everywhere, you've got 87 NACs and
> one WAC , and then even better you've got another eighty-seven NACs
> and one WAC. NAC is narrow angle camera, and WAC is wide-angle camera,
> but this will let you follow what's going on tonight in a lot of
> detail.
>
> Again, if you don't have it working in the PowerPoint that I gave you,
> if you download the TA mission description from the
> Saturn.jpl.nasa.gov Web site you'll have all this information.
>
> Does anybody have any questions about the overview? All right then, we
> did ...

W ...

T. Ray Yes.

W Just quickly, somebody said that they think there's a discrepancy on
the main Saturn Web site, on the countdown clock. It says that there's
three hours to go, but somewhere else says it's already happened.

T. Ray Okay, so this is a great conversation piece because there's
actually a lot of controversy about how to communicate what's happening.
So for the people who have said that it's already happened, what they're
saying is the spacecraft has, in fact, already executed the sequence and
has already flown by Titan. It happened at 8:30 this morning. Now, we
don't see that data on the ground until 6:30 tonight, so most people
want to do the countdown to when we see the data on the ground. So the
people who were saying, well, we've got six hours yet to go, those are
the people who are counting down to the down link. The people who said
it happened three hours ago are the ones that are saying, well, the
spacecraft has actually executed it. So that's what happens there.
They're both right, neither one of them is wrong. The person who said
we're three hours away from---oh, yes, we're three hours away from
closest approach, we passed it about three hours ago, so that's what
happens there.

W You might want to clarify that on the Web site for people.

T. Ray We thought we had. You know what's so funny is, it's so crazy
because when you talk to people, everybody is like, well, no, you should
do it this way. No, no, no you should do it this way, and literally, at
the highest levels of this project they argued about what to count down
to on the Web site, and I'm like just put them both. It's so simple.
It's not rocket science, just put them both.

M Isn't there a third time? The third time would be when the signal gets
down from the spacecraft that says yes, we actually did it.

T. Ray That's the one we currently have, the countdown after counting
when the down link is going to hit the ground, that's the countdown
we're currently doing. But yes, I will tell them that yet again the Web
site was confusing to people, which we know. We tried to come up with
a---the thing is, though, like if you ask me, I would have said oh, well
it happened three hours ago, because that's when it actually did
physically happen on the spacecraft.

Okay, well listen ...

M Can I ask one more question?

T. Ray Yes, sure.

R. Warren You mentioned on slide two---this is Ray Warren from
Colorado---something about 1.5 times the thickness of the earth on the
atmosphere there. Now, what did you mean by thickness, the altitude, the
depth of the atmosphere or the density of it? What did you mean?

K. Baines This is Kevin Baines. There are several ways to talk about
this when people talk about these things; one factor or one figure is
that the pressure at the surface of Titan is 1.6 times the earth, so 50%
more pressure. Now, that doesn't mean that's the gas, that's just the
pressure. Remember that Titan has very low gravity, so if you fold in
the gravity, then you find out that the column abundance is about eight
times or nine times, almost ten times what's on the earth, and that's
the column abundance of the extra molecules. So over every square
centimeter of Titan is ten times more molecules, ten times more nitrogen
molecules, than over the same square centimeter on the earth. So I like
to say that Titan has ten times the gas because in terms of mass, in
terms of the amount of kilograms and stuff, it's about ten times.

There's another way to talk about it, and that is density, and the fact
that now you can fold in the temperature, and the fact that Titan is so
cold means that the gas molecules were closer together even than that,
so actually you find out that the, I think it's about five times, I
think when you fold all these things together you find out that with the
low gravity but low temperature I think you get about five times the
actual density of air. So if you're thinking about things like we are
here, about future missions to Titan, and for example, if you want to
put a dirigible into the atmosphere and have it fly around, then you
find that you get five times the buoyancy from the atmosphere than you
would on the earth. So that's important for the aerodynamicists to
figure out.

This last one is about how thick the atmosphere is physically, that is,
what we're doing right now with the spacecraft, how close can you get
before you hit significant atmosphere? People can couch that in
different ways, with the one microbar level where the nanobar level or
whatever, and a round figure for that would be about five to seven times
as thick as the Earth in a sense, kilometers up to a certain bar level,
but the structure is different in the atmosphere, so it's a different
number, depending on which pressure you're going through. So, I'd like
to talk about just the fact that it's got ten times as much molecules
per square centimeter as the earth does. I think that's a pretty
impressive fact.

> Another impressive fact, while I'm talking about it, for your
> students, you might ask them what atmosphere is the solar system has
> the most nitrogen in it, per square centimeter or whatever, and
> forgetting the outer planets because they have atmospheres that are
> 20,000 kilometers deep, or 60,000 kilometers---whatever, forget that;
> any planet with a surface, basically, which has got the most nitrogen
> and people will think the earth, but it isn't; the earth is number
> three. Titan is number one.
>
> Number two, this is a little known fact, I don't want to ask people to
> guess it, but a little known fact is that Venus, that Venus is 97% CO2
> but it's 3% nitrogen and 3% of an atmosphere that's 100 bars with the
> same gravity of the earth and everything. One hundred bars means that
> you've got three bars of nitrogen, so Venus has three bars of nitrogen
> and earth has got one bar, basically, and Titan has 1.6 bars, but it
> translates to a little bit more. So actually Titan is number one, and
> Venus and earth, in terms of the amount of nitrogen gas that they've
> got per square centimeter So there are a lot of different ways to look
> at this.

T. Ray That's a great one, Kevin. The earth is three.

K. Baines Number three, yes. In the outer planets, the big planets, when
you get there you find that nitrogen is mostly in the form of ammonia,
and so here's a case out in the outer solar system where you have
nitrogen, not in the form of ammonia, but in the form of pure N2, as
we're familiar with here on the earth, and that says a lot about the
chemistry and what's been going on on Titan over eons.

T. Ray I think that's actually a really good introduction. We didn't
flip a coin or anything. We have two scientists on today, but since
Kevin has already started, we'll go ahead and do the VIMS presentation
next. So if everybody could take a minute to pull up the VIMS
presentation and then we'll do the CIRS presentation last.

K. Baines We're really excited about what's going on, Trina, and we're
glad that you designed this thing and things are working. I guess we
haven't seen any panic buttons, I haven't heard any alarms go off yet in
the building, so I guess things are working out fine and we're getting
our data. Everybody is really waiting with bated breath for this; we've
been building for 15 years for this basic event here to get our first
close up views of Titan. We got a taste of it on T0, when we went as far
away from Titan as basically I guess almost the distance of the moon is
from the earth, that kind of a distance, and now we're going to swoop on
down and skim over the top of the atmosphere, close enough, actually, to
sniff it, and INMS is going to be doing that. That's going to be really
fantastic for learning about the atmosphere. It's the first time
ever---I'm trying to think---I think it's the first time ever by the way
for INMS instrument, I think that we ever sniffed an atmosphere.

> Now, I'm not sure if the Mars people have done it, I'm not that
> familiar with the Mars program, I do everything else, and I'll say
> this right now, I'd love to say that the planetary program is split
> into two pieces, there's Mars and there's everything else. I'm in the
> everything else camp and I've done almost everything else, but I have
> not done Mars. So it's sort of like there's two different parts of
> those planetary programs and so I'm not sure about Mars, but certainly
> when it comes to Venus, Titan, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune,
> this is the first time that we've ever actually sniffed anything, so
> it's going to be really fantastic.
>
> ... that I've got, ... results in T zero, I've summarized it just in
> those two images that we took that is sort of a composite of the best
> kind of stuff, and on the right you'll see the conoical picture that
> people see me love a lot and that's our three-color false color
> picture of Titan, showing its surface as well as its atmosphere. Then
> on the left the pictures with a dark background and reds and greens,
> that's emissions. So what we can do with VIMS is that we can do a lot
> of stuff. We can look everywhere from about .35 microns, that's the UV
> part of the spectrum just below what your eyes can see, and we can
> take images all the way out to 5.1 microns, which is roughly six or
> seven or eight times further than your eyes can see. So we go from the
> UV all the way out to what's called the near infrared out to the 5.1
> microns, and throughout that whole spectrum range you see different
> things, depending on where you look.
>
> We all know that the sun shines where our eyes see basically so that
> the sun shines brightest in green light, and by the time you get out
> to the infrared the sun's pretty weak. But there are other effects
> that come in and you get emissions from the top of atmospheres when
> you look at bodies like Saturn, and we did it with Jupiter going by
> Jupiter on the way, you can actually see the heat leaving the planet
> and you can sense the temperatures, in some sense, or the heat coming
> off the planet, and that's kind of neat.
>
> I'm going to show you what we've done here with Titan, and on the
> right we've got different views mixed together, three different colors
> mixed together to get the surface, as well as get something in the
> atmosphere. We'll talk about that on the next slide, what's really
> going on. Then on the left-hand side you see different glows from
> Titan and you see this greenish arc around the left limb, and that's
> the sun hitting the atmosphere and methane fluorescing, and so it does
> that wherever the sun shines and that's kind of neat. On the right
> side you see a red glow, that's a nighttime glow that we did not
> expect. Nobody predicted this, as far as I know, on our team or
> anywhere else, but what we're going to see actually is a thermal
> signature of the warm Titan, well, warm in this case, about 160
> degrees Kelvin So we saw that glow and that's basically a testament to
> how well our instrument does, that we can really integrate very well
> and see this very same glow, and actually we can do spectra of it and
> talk about what really is causing the glow, and we'll talk about that
> in a few minutes.
>
> Let's go to the next image. Again, I mentioned the three colors that
> we put into that first picture---this is, I can't recall exactly what
> three colors, and I have down it somewhere---but this one here I think
> is slightly different, one of the colors is a little bit different and
> that's why it's purple instead of bluish on the right-hand composite.
> But in both cases what we've done is we've used 2.0 microns, which is
> a window to the atmosphere of Titan. We were very disappointed with
> the Voyager encounter back in the late '80s, or early '80s, I think it
> was actually '81.

T. Ray It was '82.

K. Baines It was '80 or '81, somewhere in there for the two Voyagers,
and we went up by Titan and it was covered with smog and it was covered
with photochemically generated junk. and we were disappointed because we
couldn't see through to the ground. On Voyager, I think the ...
wavelength they had and the visible observations was about 26 microns,
about the greenish part or the greenish-yellowish part of the spectrum,
even a little bit orangey, but they didn't have anything red at all.
What we discovered, by 1991 or 1990, somewhere in there, Earth-based
observers realized that if you just went a little bit longer in
wavelength you could be a little mini radar and actually the sunlight
could pierce right through the atmosphere and you can get down to the
surface, because the particles are so small that are in the atmosphere
that they basically disappear for light that's longer than about one
micron.

> ISS is right on the very edge of that, and the imaging people are
> struggling to see the surface, and I think they did see it, but the
> relative clarity is pretty poor, frankly, compared to what VIMS can
> do. But those particles are so small that you're talking less than
> half of an optical depth and by the time you get to 2.8 microns you're
> talking about something around .1 or .2 optical depth of optical haze,
> and now you really can't even see it. It's easy to get rid of that
> stuff and you can see right through it, and we actually can see up to
> 5 microns, and the area is very, very small optical depth due to the
> hazes. So this is not even there for us, and we're like RADAR, in the
> sense that we can pierce right through these hazes and really see the
> surface very clearly. So I call it the crystal clear view of Titan at
> 2.0 microns.
>
> On the left-hand side the red image is just showing that one
> wavelength and the variety that we see. We see albedo changing by
> about a factor of three across the surface, there between that
> sideways-H feature that's up above the ten o'clock position, and then
> the bright area in the middle is about a factor of three difference in
> albedo. Near the bottom you see a little white spot, and you see that
> white spot in all three images, and that's a dead giveaway that you're
> looking---the way I've done this is that's sort of a dead giveaway
> that you've got something that's much higher up. Actually, this
> image---I'm backing up---it's on the previous image that shows the
> blue limb. There we've actually used a wavelength that is sensitive,
> that really does absorb to the methane. We used one that the methane
> gas in that atmosphere does absorb, and therefore if you do see
> anything in that particular wavelength--- not showing here, I'm just
> alluding to it---if you do show an image that the methane gas band,
> then if you see anything that means you're seeing an object that's up
> high in the atmosphere because otherwise you'd have methane basically
> wiping out. So the fact that you see something means that you're
> looking at an object that's high up, and we can use that information
> then to get the altitude of the clouds, and we'll talk about that in a
> few minutes.
>
> So on this picture you can see this grey white thing near the bottom,
> and from these three particular wavelengths you could not write a
> paper saying that that's a cloud, but when you fold in some of the
> other wavelengths you can easily say yes, it's a high altitude cloud
> at around 20 kilometers altitude. With these three we just kind of put
> together the surace wavelengths, and the last one shows that you're
> seeing albedo, the middle one shows a bright limb, and that's due to
> the increased path length and even though the haze is optically thin,
> by the time you pile it all up on the limb with a long path length
> through the side of the atmosphere and now you see a pretty
> substantial optical thickness of haze, and so now you see that
> shimmering limb because of that. But you see in the middle is pretty
> dark, except for some faint haze and stuff, and again when you stretch
> this picture, in fact, we got a better one that we just saw yesterday,
> that just came down, where we went to 2.73 microns.
>
> I've got to say this first image that came out poster child image,
> wasn't intended to be the poster child image. We got images of much
> higher space resolution, about 50% higher space resolution, later on,
> but the sun angle wasn't so great and so from a PR point of view it
> didn't look so good and so we ended up resorting to this particular
> data set, which was our first images that we took, and for this we
> were in what's called a ride-along mode, and we were just riding along
> with somebody else. Because of that, we had data volume problems,
> Trina knows full well about all of us fighting for every little bit of
> data, and so we had to give up some of our data.
>
> So, what we did was we did what's called wavelength editing, and so
> this image cube that we sent down, even though we had the potential to
> send down 352 colors, we only sent down 128 on this opportunity and we
> missed something around 2.7 microns. I saw that and I said, boy, I
> miss out. That, to me, is always my favorite wavelength and I do it on
> Jupiter all the time and I don't know how we missed it, so what we
> used to ... here, but 2.7microns does show the surface a lot better
> and we just saw again yesterday some better images and it's really
> kind of cool stuff. But if you stretch this one really, really hard
> you can actually see the same kind of features that you see in the
> left-hand picture. But what it shows is that in this wavelength range,
> around 2.7 and 2.8, the surface is absorbing, and that's a dead
> giveaway for some kinds of material that we're trying to look for.
> Just one wavelength doesn't really get it to you, but you can tell hey
> we've got interesting organic type stuff going on, absorption going on
> at the surface, maybe ammonia-like ices and other things that we need
> to look at.
>
> Then on the 5 micron one, this is the first time I can recall and
> maybe Connor can correct me later when he talks, but in the 5 micron
> range out by the infrared---they tried it from the earth, but again,
> it's hard to do 5 microns from the earth ... wavelength so long that
> it's hard to get a clear image, and you need to be close to a body to
> get a nice image. This is one of our first 5 micron images. At 5
> microns the sun can blast right through the atmosphere and there's no
> methane to absorb, but now again you have a clear shot at what the
> surface is made out of and by looking at different wavelengths around
> 5 microns, again, we have many, many wavelengths, so we can do a
> spectrum and we can start figuring out what's on the surface, and
> throughout 5 microns is also that we have a good ice detector, a
> water/ice detector, so we can tell if there's water or ice on the
> surface and that's something we're going to be doing a lot more of in
> this particular encounter coming up today.
>
> So that's a basic synopsis. I put those three pictures together and
> got the one on the right. As you can see, we do a variety of surface
> features. One thing that we were looking for, right off the bat, one
> simple piece of science you can do, and I'm doing it on this Rev as
> well last night, looking at what we got so far, and we're still pretty
> far, the images that we've got down so far aren't as good as this one,
> they're maybe half the ... resolution as this one.

T. Ray About 700,000 km...

K. Baines So about half. I was just eyeballing looking at last night
compared to ... and it's about half. But nevertheless, we're still
looking for this one thing called specular reflection and it's a good
thing to teach in school, and I'm sure everybody who's ever looked on
water when the sun is setting, you see this glint off of water and it
really overpowers everything. The water does not look blue, it looks
white, and it's really the sun that's glinting. We're looking for that
as well, because fluid on the surface of Titan is a big subject and
we've believed for 20 years that there would be some kind of fluids on
the surface.

> So one quick and dirty way of doing it is just look for specular
> reflection, because that will be a booming signal almost that any
> wavelength that can get to the surface you'd see it just overpowering
> everything. We've looked and you'll see it here, and we just looked at
> some data I got last night and we don't see it there either, but this
> glint will be concentrated in a little spot, so we think we've only
> probed, in a sense, 2% of the surface and the image I saw yesterday
> probably another 1- 2%. So we don't see anything shining on water yet,
> and now of course we're all thinking of ways that you can still get
> fluid on a surface and not get the glint, and you can always think of
> a muddy, slushy surface full of junk floating on top that could maybe
> prevent you from seeing this shiny surface reflecting.
>
> But it's just one of the things we'll be looking for, because it's
> such a dead giveaway, it's easy to find. If there's no pollution on
> the surface, then you should see this and it would be a dead certainty
> then that you've got fluids on the surface and we can talk then about
> Oceans One thing I was thinking we don't have on this project is an
> oceanographer. I also thought about 15 years ago that we should be
> getting someone who knows about oceanography in a sense.

T. Ray I know that earth-based RADAR observations looking for the glint,
they've seen it here and there.

K. Baines But that's them using their own signals. We're using sunlight
here. You know it's probably the same thing. I'm not sure how 100% sure
they are. I know that in this pass if they see variations they'll be
able to really. One thing about the specular reflection also is that
it's a very specific geometry, so you can just look to see where the sun
is and where you are, and you can say, okay, the glint should be right
there, "x" marks the spot. If you see it if you see this big boom, then
you've got proof positive that it's there. Now, other people are talking
about well, can that just be liquid surfaces that could be some kind of
flat, very flat field of ice, but that would be---you're going to find
an anomalous region, whatever it's going to be we're going to debate
over, I'm sure, for weeks about what it is we see, but what it says is
that you've got something different going on, on the surface there and
it will be very interesting to see.

Just from these kind of different views that we're seeing from here, the
impression has always been that Titan is very variegated and has all
sorts of different things going on. We've talked about rivers and ponds,
we've even talked about cryogenic volcanoes, we've got a bunch of people
now looking for that. We're hoping to see that. If it were to go off we
would have several ways of seeing it, so these would be ammonia powered
volcanoes more than anything else, and we're trying to see if we see
that. So there's a lot of new stuff that we'll be doing in the future.

Going to the next page, I just show on that one what the perspective
was, and it shows you that on T-zero we had a good view of the South
Pole, and that cloud that you see at the bottom of all these pictures,
that really is a tucked in right near the South Pole. We watched it for
over, I forget, I'll show you later, I think it's about ten hours worth
of data, and we watched the thing move. We got a reasonably good wind
speed on that feature.

On the next page, which I don't have the number up in front of me, it
says distributions of wind. Again, you see that feature there and that's
the South Pole, and again, about 88 degrees south latitude, and it s a
pretty big feature, I think it's 200 kilometers across. In ISS saw that
it really is comprised of a number of individual little globules or
little towers, maybe wave forms, but the point is it's not a uniform
cloud, there's a lot of little things in there. At our resolution we
don't see it. Just to give you an idea, we get 350 new colors and that's
our forte. We can do spectral analysis. We can do all sorts of things
with that, but one thing we have to give up in order to get that kind of
spectral resolution and spectral coverage is that we gave up on spatial
resolution. So our spatial resolution is pretty poor compared to this
crystal beautiful ISS images that come down, and at our best resolution
we get about 1/40 in each dimension, 1/40 the resolution of ISS So they
can see a lot sharper than we can, but we can view a lot more
wavelength, so they're very complementary.

T. Ray Right. You have the same wavelength region that they do ...

K. Baines Yes, we do overlap, but then we go on and we can do things
like do ... Now, in the visible where we overlap, we actually get three
times the resolution than we usually do, so now we're down to maybe
about 25 or 30 times poor resolution in each element, that's the
visible.

T. Ray A full service spacecraft, is what I call it; we can do it all.

K. Baines That's a good way to say it. This spacecraft is probably the
last of a kind for a while until we get maybe this JIMO thing whatever
is coming along, but this thing costs about \$2 billion, including the
probe, and we're not talking that way anymore in the space program,
we're talking smaller, better, faster, cheaper, we still are, and that's
why we've gone to the Discovery program and some...

T. Ray But this is what you get when you spend that kind of money, you
get ...

K. Baines Yes. You get an international flavor and it's hard to do that
with the smaller missions, it's too complicated, but when you have the
resources to really do something fantastic like this, then you can---and
this is really a bargain, even though it cost \$2 billion \$1 billion
was spent by the Europeans, at least, and we spent probably over about
\$1.6 billion. So the point is, we've kind of leveraged together and we
have this fantastic mission and of course we're all waiting for that
probe data to come back, that's going to be incredible, in January.

Now, this is our best picture of clouds and you can see that we saw
several clouds. The main one is in the middle there, but you can see
other little fragments of clouds around. We've now measured that, some
place I thought I listed what it was, but I guess I don't see it here.
Anyway, what we're measuring, by the way, that cloud motion is about
half a meter a second, plus or minus about two or three meters per
second. We have an error margin that it could have stayed still, but we
think it is going, the best guess is half a meter a second and it's
going prograde, and this has been one of the outstanding issues, is
which way do the winds blow on Titan. Does it blow the normal, typical
way, that is, with the orbital rotation of the planet as it circles
Saturn? In this case, by the way, it's a locked moon just like all the
moons are really out there, most of the moons, but nevertheless you can
still think of it rotating about Saturn, so, there is a certain
rotational direction. The question has always been: does the air blow
the way that the planet is rotating? Our answer so far is: yes, it is. A
lot of people over the years have come up with answers that a big error
bars but typically but everybody seems to favor the prograde, so I don't
think anybody has yet to come up with a retrograde wind yet.

All three of these features that are shown on this image, the main one
with two fragments all show about half a meter to a meter best fit
meters per second. This is something that we're going to be doing, this
is near and dear to my heart, is measuring the wind and coming up with
aerodynamic aspects of Titan, and so one thing we'll be doing with VIMS
is measuring cloud motion. ISS can do that readily as well, and probably
a lot better, but we can do things like do the altitudes, and that's
what we're showing on the next few graphs, cloud structure, we can go up
and down these different absorption bands through the atmosphere.

> It's very similar to having a swimming pool. Talk about this as having
> a swimming pool we can do basically cloud stratigraphy. The way we use
> cloud stratigraphy or altitude of the clouds is what you do in a
> swimming pool, if you had a color target with all those colors of the
> rainbow on it and then you start lowering it into the pool, you can
> see the red colors go away. If you looked at this target and you can
> tell it's under water but you saw red in it, you would know it's close
> to the surface, it's only a depth of a few inches. But then if you saw
> this target, which you knew had all the colors in it, but then you
> only see the yellows and the greens come through, you know it's a
> little bit deeper. Then when you saw only blue's come through you'd
> say oh, it's even deeper. Then when you saw it really dark, the blues
> come through because now the lights really going away on it and it's
> even deeper.
>
> So you can probably tell, to some extent, that the altitudes of a
> target inside of a pool, maybe four different levels you could
> probably do your own cloud stratigraphy or object stratigraphy on an
> object that you put into a pool like that. We do the same thing here
> by looking at clouds and how much light that's reflected at different
> wavelengths, where the reds, greens and blues basically come back, and
> we've got a specific set of wavelengths that have to do with methane
> absorption. Methane's a very effective absorber. It's in all the
> planets out there, all the big planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and
> Neptune, and it's also in Titan. We know pretty much how it behaves at
> these low temperatures and over wavelength, so we can get an idea of
> where these clouds are.
>
> Caitlin Griffith, on our team, she did a thesis on Titan, and we've
> now made her a part of our VIMS team, and she's done a quick Radio
> transfer analysis to come up with the altitude of the cloud, and her
> initial solution is that it's at 20, plus or minus five kilometers. On
> that figure you see several different curves. The upper one with the
> yellow is the cloud, and you can see just how much more light comes
> back when you have a high altitude cloud, compared to the other areas
> next door, which are the lower curves which don't have high altitude
> clouds.
>
> So the difference of those two things is what's being absorbed in the
> atmosphere between the cloud and the ground, as well as some on the
> ground there is due to the fact that the ground itself absorbs, where
> the cloud is pretty bright. But by looking at the wavelength
> dependence then of that fall-off in energy coming back, you can tell
> where the cloud is, and she's got 20, plus or minus five kilometers,
> was her altitude at the time of this analysis. However, I did hear her
> speak about two weeks ago, and I'm trying to remember what meeting it
> was---I've been running around to so many meetings---and I think she's
> upping that number to be more toward the 25 kilometers.
>
> But this is preliminary. Everything I'm showing you, by the way, I'd
> like to say that this is all preliminary stuff; we haven't submitted
> any papers yet. We might change our mind on some of this stuff down
> the road. We're giving you sort of a quick look at this. Some people
> on our team wouldn't like this stuff out there in the public domain
> yet because we always like to reserve the right to change our mind, so
> I hope you guys use this with the right attitude and don't come back
> and criticize us later for coming up with a different answer, because
> as we fold in more observations and as we fold in more calibrations
> and things like that that we have to do, we may change our answers. So
> I'm trusting you guys won't make us look bad down the road if we come
> back and say, hey, we were wrong about this, its at 25 kilometers, not
> 20 kilometers. But I just want to give you a flavor for how we can do
> our science.
>
> The next thing is emissions. So we're talking about sunlight and how
> it can allow us to probe the atmosphere and the surface, and now we
> can use basically emissions from the atmosphere and basically in some
> sense a lot of this is due to Titan's own indigenous properties,
> although in some cases it's also powered by the sun. Anyway, on the
> left-hand side I've got three different colors and three different
> wavelengths of Titan, and the one on the left is your economical view,
> looking again at 2.01 microns or 2.02, seeing the surface of the
> planet and you can see the crescent shape body we're at basically 90
> degrees phase angle, this one is off to the left, and on the blue you
> really can't see the structure very well, the differences on the
> surface, but the point is, this is what the surface looks like.
>
> Then, object next-door, on the green image, it's a lot bigger Titan,
> and that just is the blow-up of Titan that you get when you finally
> can see that atmosphere, which takes up about one-third of the radius.
> So the thickness that you see of the atmosphere on the left is an
> extensive whole size of atmosphere, about a third. Actually, all of
> the methane is not showing up here, there's a little bit more off to
> the left than what you can see here. But basically in a sense
> one-third cubed or whatever gets you another 100%, so the point is you
> can double the volume of Titan if you look at the atmosphere. The
> atmosphere is basically double the volume of Titan, is a good thing
> little thing to talk about.
>
> No other body in the solar system, terrestrial like body, which Titan
> is, has that kind of thick atmosphere. The earth has got a thin skin,
> where the atmosphere is something like 150 kilometers thick or
> something on a body of just 4,000 kilometers in radius. This thing had
> an atmosphere 700 or 800 kilometers thick, and in some sense it might
> even be 1,200 kilometers thick, as we're going to sniff it, we're
> going to be seeing the top of it, so the point is this body is only
> 2,500 kilometers in radius, so it's a very thick atmosphere and
> unusual circumstance, and it's very revealing here when we look at the
> methane fluorescence where the sun is beaming down on the methane, and
> the methane seems to be radiating and you can see that.
>
> The red image is our discovery here of the glow on the right, on the
> left you see that between 4.5 and 4.7 microns the sunlight gets to the
> surface and so you see the surface there, just like you do in the blue
> image on the left, because the sun itself is contributing a lot of
> light, even though it's much weaker than what you see at two microns,
> there still is enough light that we can see it. But on the right side
> at nighttime you've got a uniform glow over there and that is due to
> stratospheric emissions, and I put all that together in the right-hand
> picture so you'd see all the glows at once or all the interesting
> things at once.
>
> That night slide, I think we have another image. This is a blow-up of
> it, so now I put scales on there so you can see just how thick this
> thing is, and on this scale the atmosphere is 730 kilometers on the
> left, with a methane fluorescence and then on the right with the night
> flow it looks like we're getting visible glows at this kind of
> signal-to-noise around up to 400 kilometers altitude above the
> surface. Let's go to the next image.
>
> So here's a profile of that right side, and you can see then that
> slope, how it slopes down and a lot of the scale there, above the 400
> kilometer tick mark we're still getting a little bit of radiation
> there, so that sort of gives me the idea it's about 400 kilometers
> thick there for that glow. Let's go ahead with the next image.
>
> This next slide, Titan night-side 4.7 micron spectrum, we actually
> show you a spectrum of that region, and so color by color there, and
> we've got things like CH3D marked there around 4.55 microns or so, and
> that's what we think that is. We see a big peak there, and so a big
> contributor to that night glow that we see is CH3D. Next to it there
> are two other little emissions kind of separated by something that
> looks like an absorption, but it's just a decrease in emissions. That
> is likely CO, but we're still working on this, and Pierre De Sarte is
> one of the world's experts on how to analyze this data, he's part of
> our team, he's in Paris and he's right now, I hope he is, he promised
> me he would, trying to really do the models of this thing. The
> preliminary models came from him and he's really trying to use this
> data, because this is a great way to sense the temperatures and the
> amount of species like carbon dioxide, which is very small amounts in
> Titan, and now we can maybe figure out exactly how much there is there
> using these kinds of emissions. We can do it as a function of
> altitude, just doing a profile from the surface on out to space. Of
> course on this pass we're going to be doing it again and trying to do
> a lot higher space resolution so we get finer scales on what's going
> on. Then we also have a hint of CO2, which is also very trace species,
> a very small amount of stuff there, and so in this one spectra, the
> night glow, we have three different species, all of which are very
> important to look at and tell us a lot about the chemistry and the
> mechanisms going on in the Titan atmosphere.
>
> On the left I've got a little diagram showing that the temperature
> does increase to about 160 or 170 Kelvin, which cold compared to
> Earth, but it's warm compared to the surface of Titan. So we think
> these things are emitted, where it gets warm in the atmosphere and
> things to the first order seem to fit and we're still doing the
> modeling on this.
>
> Then we've got the cloud track ones I knew we had the cloud track ones
> ones, I guess they got stuck back here. These are fixed images that we
> took over a 13-hour period on the first pass, kind of doing a centroid
> analysis of that major cloud, you can see the cloud kind of move
> around because our perspective is changing on the planet as we go by
> over 13 hours. By the way, this case, this is a combination of three
> colors we've used here, and here on the blue I see that we've used a
> 2.13 micron and that is a wavelength that basically the atmosphere
> absorbs very readily, and if you see something that's blue it's
> something being scattered off from the top of the atmosphere. The
> cloud shows white because the cloud is reflecting all three colors,
> red green, and blue, and almost everything else there is not
> reflecting all three colors equally, so the cloud stands out very
> readily.
>
> We did an analysis this way, and this is how I got the half meter per
> second plus or minus three meters a second prograde on the sky. We did
> it two different ways. This is the first time I know that when you do
> cloud tracking we can actually have a surface below you which you can
> compare your cloud position to. Usually you do it, you say well,
> here's this big gas ball, Jupiter, Saturn, or whatever, and you see
> the cloud and you have to know the latitude and longitude of
> everything and you do it from C-Kernels, but we have a backup system
> here where we can measure this cloud relative to that backwards "L",
> you see the dark little feature near the center and so I call it the
> backwards "L", and we can just measure that cloud relative to the
> corner of that "L". We did it both ways and we get the same kind of
> answer.

T. Ray Actually, on that very last picture, Kevin, even though it looks
like it's moved up a whole bunch, the "L" is still very close to it.

K. Baines Right. and you've got to take the geometry into account, but
the point is, we can use this to great effect throughout the mission if
we can find more clouds, and then we have a second way to do this, so in
case somebody messes up with the C-kernels we can verify by looking at
the features. Now there's a little bit of Paralax you've got to worry
about, but not too badly here. So I'm just saying this is kind of a neat
thing we can do. This week at Titan, in fact today at Titan we are going
to be doing this up to 100 times better than what we just saw, and so
we're really looking forward to this. We'll be dong much of the same I
just showed you. ... any news that we're doing there we just didn't see,
there probably isn't much new. We tried everything before and I think
we're just going to do it.

T. Ray Pretty much on the other side, right? Because ... we're pretty
much on the other side of Titan from the "H"

K. Baines This gives us another view of a different hemisphere, so we
can do the surface down there. On this one, this canonical picture that
you see, we had this circular feature up just above the center, which if
you kind of squint at it, it looks like a crater. The team has been
really into this, the surface people. The VIMS team, I explained, the
VIMS team has 25 co-investigators and I can say pretty clearly that the
only two atmospheric scientists on the team officially, in terms of the
people that were picked back 15 years ago, is myself and Pierre De
Sarte, and then we brought on some other people to help us out, but the
bulk of the team's interest has always been Icy satellites and rings and
doing compositional studies of the surfaces of those Icy satellites.
This is an Icy satellite that's covered with an atmosphere that they
were a little bit miffed that there was such a big atmosphere that they
couldn't see the surface. But I am miffed that there are so few clouds
and I want more clouds so that I can do tracking better.

T. Ray Everyone is equally miffed.

K. Baines Actually, laugh in a few months and we'll get more clouds, but
this is great. They're seeing things that look like a crater, at this
point we're not sure if it's a crater or not. It could just be an albedo
feature in the surface, but getting 100 times closer is going to really
help out. You won't see this particular crater, but on the other side
will be a little and hopefully figure out what's going on, and maybe as
you see other really intriguing geological systems, we have a lot of
geologists on our team and they're really looking forward to doing that,
looking for river systems, ponds, lakes, and who knows what. I'm
interested in looking for the effects of weather on these things over
the eons on Titan that we can talk about erosion and those kinds of
things, that's an added bonus looking at this sort of, I'm going to say
earth-like planet. This is the closest thing to the earth, in a lot of
ways, that we have in the solar system, because it does have kinda looky
looking things we think it has fluid somewhere and it's got an
atmosphere made of nitrogen and clouds and storms, so we're hoping to
see a storm. We haven't seen one yet that we would call a storm, but
Titan has got something for everybody, is the bottom line. Like I said,
we should have brought the oceanographers on because we left them out.
There's something for everybody. So that's where we are.

This image here, the next one called Medrez is the one that as a team
we'll probably focus most on in the next day or two. This is the 3x2
that was in that movie that Trina showed. Everybody is excited about
this. Tonight when it comes down about 8:30 or 9:00 and probably by the
time we get it reduced at the Univeristy of Arizona where we do most of
our data reduction, it will be about 9:00 or 10:00 tonight we should all
have this. Everybody is going to go to town on this set of images,
because it is going to be two or three times better than we had before
so before we had about 150, so this is six times better resolution. Then
we get a much better one later on.

> I showed you the package of the next image, the landing site, and
> that's something I really want to do well, because now landing sites,
> for the first time ever we tried it in Galileo, but I don't think it
> really worked too well, but I'm going to say the first I remember
> we're really going to be able to understand the atmosphere and the
> surface, get a fiducial point on a surface and be able to then compare
> that to the remote sensing determinations of what's going on. This is
> going to be a great calibration down the road, when we compare what we
> have here to what the Huygens probe is going to be seeing in January,
> and we can see if we're right or wrong in how we do our analysis. This
> is another reason why I'm going to say that we might change our mind
> on that when we find out, oops, we had something wrong, the
> temperature behavior or whatever of this gas, that we thought we knew
> how it behaved and it isn't quite behaving right, and that we need to
> tweak our model. But getting that fiducial mark on the surface is
> going to be incredibly good for then expanding and getting the whole
> planet right down the road.
>
> So we're doing that, and we are also doing this fantastic mosaic of 15
> images, I think it is that we're doing at Closest Approach and we
> showed very quickly that we're going by doing this but these are
> little tiny images, 12x12 pixels apiece, that we then stitched
> together, and I don't know how many days it's going to take to stitch
> this thing together, but that will be a very high resolution. We hope
> to get one kilometer resolution out of that of the surface, but it's
> going to be just like RADAR a little strip, but it's going to be kind
> of fantastic and maybe we'll see incredible features in that
> particular image, particularly since we're doing it in so many
> different wavelengths. I hope to see all sorts of things pop out.
>
> So that's really a taste of what's to come tonight, and by tomorrow
> morning, hopefully we'll have the answers and some neat things to show
> everybody. Can we take questions now or ...?

T. Ray Oh, yes, if there are questions. If you want to ask a question
just star six and it will un-mute you and you can ask a question. You're
welcome to ask questions during the presentation also.

J. Malding-Kinney This is Jenny Malding-Kinney from Atlanta, Georgia
solar system ambassador. I had a question about how high you thought
that cloud was towards the South Pole?

K. Baines We think it's about 20-25 kilometers altitude at this point.
It might be actually up to 30, I think I heard Caitlin say she wouldn't
rule out 30 the other day, but we're still doing the analysis of that.
There are several different factors you've got to take into account to
really get it accurately, but it's certainly above the surface; 25
kilometers is about 75,000 feet, if you do things in feet, so it's
pretty high up. But the other aspect is what's it made out of and
things, and it's pretty clear, we think, that we're looking at methane
clouds, and where we determine the altitude is consistent with where we
expect it to be, based on the temperature structure of the atmosphere.
Just like in the earth's atmosphere, water clouds condense at a certain
level, where the water comes out of the atmosphere and basically
condenses, and you can predict where that should be on Titan and we're
finding pretty consistent answers to that.

> Now, when you get a cloud condensing out, you get the base where you
> think it should be, but then it can billow on up based on dynamics. So
> one of the things we'll be doing is looking for the and she's
> basically able to tell us the cloud top so, one thing we're going to
> be doing as we look at different clouds over the mission is looking
> for a variety of cloud top and then watch a cloud, and we'd love to be
> able to be around long enough to watch a cloud actually form and
> dissipate or whatever, and then we can talk a lot about the vertical
> dynamics and what's going on with the up and down drafts in the
> atmosphere.
>
> There's one outstanding question when we're talking about clouds is
> why do we continue to see clouds over the southern hemisphere, near
> the South Pole. This has been recognized in the last five years or so,
> that when we look, once in a while you see a cloud, people look to
> Titan through the Hubble space telescope and ground based observations
> now for ten or fifteen years, and their views get clearer and clearer
> and clearer over the years. In the last few years they've gotten good
> enough that they can actually see clouds, so there's been this
> southern cloud that's been seen for the last few years and I don't
> think there's ever been, maybe little wispy clouds, and we saw one
> here during our first encounter, little wispy not so substantial
> clouds in other places, but really the most predominant cloud has been
> in the southern hemisphere near the South Pole, and it's consistent
> with what we see here very clearly, and the question is why. If it
> turns out that over the next four years we see only one major cloud
> and it's always around the South Pole, the question is why is that?
> There's a lot of speculation out there what would make a cloud just
> form over the South Pole, everything from aurographic(?) uplift, and
> this is why I'm waiting for RADAR to see the South Pole, because you
> can imagine that you have winds blowing around in a vortex that
> encounters a mountain then the mountain deflects the air upward and if
> you had some moisture, methane moisture in this case, you could get
> the methane to condense out and form a cloud. So maybe that's what it
> is.

T. Ray ... volcano?

K. Baines I don't know why it would be at 20 kilometers. To me you see
bigger stuff---I think we'd see a different signature in our spectrum,
but the other thing is waves it might be just an atmosphere of waves,
and the first case I talked about was aurogrpahic uplift, that really
sets up what's called a gravity wave, which is just air bobbing up and
down because the mountain deflected it upward and it went up too high
and it comes down again. But there are other kinds of waves that can in
an atmosphere, so maybe it's indicating some other kind of atmospheric
phenomenon. So we're going to keep studying these things and watching
this thing change and see if we can ...

T. Ray The cloud is very dynamic. The imaging team took four pictures
over about half an hour to an hour, and you can see features in the
clouds come and go.

K. Baines Yes. So there are a lot of different things going on and a lot
of physics, but if we can sit and stare at it, and maybe this movie that
they just took will help us get there.

T. Ray Yes, because they saw the cloud over the South Pole .

K. Baines Yes, you've seen their images , I haven't their images yet, so
I've got to go look, but I'm intrigued that they're taking this data and
we ought to see just how close. Now, we did see the data last night that
we took from 700,000 kilometers, we saw that cloud again. Our images are
very fuzzy, about half the resolution you just saw, and I said, well,
we've got that feature again. I first thought we had something new,
because that feature was at the top of the picture, and then I asked my
grad student, I said, now, please check and make sure north is up and
not down, and it was rotated. So south was up, okay, so it's the same
cloud, and we look at it, but we didn't do much with it because our
visibility was so poor and it was so far away. But it's still there, I
can report that it's still there and ...

Now, this cloud may come and go, so what we want to do is look at it,
hopefully sometime we can look at it for a couple of days as we go
whizzing by in a way that we can see is it the same cloud coming and
going or is one cloud basically dissipating downstream and then you see
that one. I can't really say how that we've seen, four months ago.
Anyway, what's nice is that there is something for us Cloud-people to
look at. We wish there was more of the planet that had it, but then we'd
be obscuring great stuff on the ground. So I think it's probably a
pretty good medium that we sit here for everybody.

M ... mention volcano, but not necessarily volcano ... liquids, would
that be a possibility?

M For this particular cloud?

M Yes, from the clouds, some type of plume.

K. Baines I think if you see a plume you would see evidence for that
plume, just like if you visit Mt. St. Helens blowing up, you would see
it on the ground. You just wouldn't see a cloud that seemed to be at 20
kilometers, and we think there are wind shears in the atmosphere, so
you'd get the top of the cloud moving downstream from the bottom of the
cloud, so you would see this little trail, you would see a trail. It
wouldn't be a circular feature, I don't think, it would be a linear
trail and you could tell that the head of the cloud is at a higher
altitude and as you go downstream towards the source or upstream back
toward the source, you'd see it get lower and lower and lower. I think
there are all sorts of ways you can---and then also the spectra of it,
it may have a different spectral character I would think being a
chemical mix of something, that wouldn't be a typical methane.

> I think there are all sorts of ways---also, if the thing is as hot as
> 160K, just like we saw with the CH3D, if it was as warm as 150K,
> there's a good chance that we'd see the thermal signature of the
> volcano tube big enough that we could resolve it. So that's one thing
> that at Closest Approach we're going to be looking for volcanic
> signatures. We do that on the night side, the night side images showed
> you, well, it had both a day side and a night side, but throughout the
> mission we're doing night side stuff as well, even close up night
> side, hoping to catch a volcano in the act, hoping to catch lightning
> in the act if we haven't had it. Looking at night side is good for all
> sorts of stuff, and that's some stuff we'll be doing.

M How do we know we will be a thermal phenomenon, but maybe something
chemically reactive happening in the upper atmosphere that makes it more
obvious up there?

K. Baines Oh, are you saying just actually having ... chemistry. We
think that the chemicals of Titan are pretty mixed. You don't get
localized enhancements of certain molecules over others too much, and
particularly in terms of longitudinal enhancements. You can get
latitudinal enhancements, and I'm sure Connor is going to talk about
that with his instrument they can do fantastic stuff looking at the
latitudinal distribution and stuff, but I find it hard to believe but
maybe they have it already, Connor might even have it, on seeing
longitudinal stuff, because when the winds blow east to west things mix
up along latitude lines very quickly, so it's hard to keep something so
that you can keep a concentration of it so then it can combine with
something else and you get a localized cloud out of that as a result. If
it was a spread out cloud that was on a latitudinal band and it looks
funny, based on its particle size or something, I might say yes, that's
a good idea, maybe you can get some chemistry. But so far we're just
talking about stuff in the atmosphere that we know condenses anywhere.
We know methane condenses out at these kind of levels, given the
temperature structure that we have, and so methane is expected and we
see it, so we're going to say right now that it's methane mostly, but I
guess it could be some other things going on at the same time.

T. Ray Okay, if everybody could bring up the CIRS presentation.

M Just one more question about the previous presentation, where it has
on slide , I'm sorry, it's page three of the PDF, the organics at 5
micron. What exactly do we mean by "organic" and what type of materials
are we looking at there in that ...?

K. Baines At this point it's very nebulous. We're basically saying that
there are things with CH stretches , carbon and hydrogen stretches, so
...

M So hydrocarbons?

K. Baines Hydrocarbons, any type of hydrocarbon. I was disappointed to
see that as soon as we said the word "organic" on there, within a day
somebody had a Web site talking about life found on Titan. I said: how
do they get that idea? Because you used the word "organic." I said:
what, don't people know that organic means carbons and hydrogen together
and it could be anything? I mean, methane's an organic and acetylene,
it's nothing to be talked about, but we get in a lot of trouble if we
... Then I started getting e-mails from colleagues saying: why did you
say there was life on Titan? I said: Who's saying that? I didn't say
anything about life on Titan. Why do people think we're talking about
life? Because you used the word organic. All right, well, I mean, med
students use organic for anything that ...

M So it would be a good idea if we put hydrocarbons in there instead.

K. Baines Yes, hydrocarbons.

M Thanks.

T. Ray Well, Connor you're up. You've got about 45 minutes. If we run a
little bit late we still have the line. Take it away.

C. Nixon Good afternoon to everybody. I'm with the CIRS team, the
composite infrared spectrometer. Can everybody hear me?

T. Ray Yes.

C. Nixon Okay. I'm going to be talking about the CIRS instrument, what
we can do, what our capabilities are, what we're hoping to see on Titan,
and I'm not going to be talking too much about data. We have a paper
which we just submitted based on the T-zero approach. Unfortunately, we
can't talk about that because it's in press, so what I'm going to be
concentrating on is the science that we're looking forward to doing on
TA and then looking forward a little bit toward the mission.

On page two, basically what is CIRS? What is Composite Infrared
Spectrometer? It's always hard to describe what we do compared to the
ISS and VIMS temas which produces very nice pictures, pretty much
straightaway, versus spectrometers where essentially we're splitting
light up into the spectrum and looking at the different colors, colors
of heat effectively, and ... further along the wavelength range than
what Kevin's just been talking about for VIMS. So we're going right out
to one millimeter wavelength of light, and CIRS has the name that it has
with composite because we have two spectrometers which cover different
wavelength ranges, both in the infrared, one in what we call the mid
infrared 7-17 microns and then one in the far infrared from 17 to 1,000
microns.

> CIRS, we're concentrating on our spectral resolution rather than our
> spatial resolution, like the ISS and VIMS team, so trying to
> distinguish, as finely as we can, all the different gradations of
> electromagnetic radiation that we see to search for different
> molecules. The CIRS instrument was assembled by an international team
> at NASA Goddard, but with substantial hardware contributions from
> other countries in Europe, and we've got a lot of collaborators in
> multiple countries, 15 countries.
>
> The next slide shows a conceptual layout of the CIRS instrument. I'm
> not going to go into details here, this is just to give you a flavor
> of how the instrument works, with the light coming in at the top from
> the telescope being split right there where the beam gets split into
> two parts, going left and right and into the two sides of our
> interferometer. Effectively, all these are doing is analyzing the
> light into its component colors and splitting it up so that we can
> detect what they are.
>
> So I'll move right along to the next page. This shows the CIRS
> instrument on the Cassini spacecraft. There's a conceptual on the left
> and the actual photograph of Cassini on the right. CIRS is that
> gold-covered area you see there, with our telescope just kind of
> pointing upwards in that picture. We also have another piece at 90
> degrees to that, which is actually a radiator, it's really a radiator
> which keeps our mid infrared detectors at the very cold temperature
> that they need to operate. We have that big cooler there on the other
> side. Typically when we're putting the telescope pointing at Titan and
> pointing our cooler away from Titan and we hope as far away from the
> sun as we can as well, or any other bright object like Saturn,
> Saturn's rings, ...
>
> I'll move right along to the next slide, and I've titled this: "Why
> CIRS is the Greatest." CIRS, of all the what we call the four optical
> remote sensing instruments, CIRS has the greatest range of wavelength
> that it can cover, over two orders of magnitude from roughly ten
> microns to 1,000 microns. The others there, UVIS, ISS, and VIMS, but
> CIRS, in terms of spectral coverage, gets the prize for the widest
> range. It may not take the sharpest pictures, but we can cover the
> greatest range of wavelengths.
>
> On the next slide you can see, this just shows our projected focal
> plane on the sky. We have this large circular detector called FP1 on
> the left, and this is our far infrared sensor. Then on the right we
> have these two 1x10 strips of detectors, but though this picture
> doesn't show it, these are actually all in a line, and they don't
> quite line up there, but this was a measurement that we did to try and
> see how they looked once we were in space. So we have these detectors,
> and these are what we're using to look at the planet. You can see that
> with the large circular detector we're not going to be able to get the
> spatial resolution that we can with those small squares, so in the far
> infrared we have a lesser spatial resolution than we do in the mid
> infrared, and that's because we need the larger detector to detect
> those longer wavelengths.
>
> Moving to the next slide. I've just given a couple of aspects of what
> CIRS is trying to do. CIRS has many different roles, in terms of
> looking at the surfaces of the Icy satellites, the non-Titan
> satellites of Saturn, and then the atmospheres, of course, of Titan
> and Saturn and not primarily what ... in my scientific research is
> atmospheric compositions of Titan and Saturn. Also the rings, we can
> do very good ring science, in terms of the composition, the particle
> sizes and chips of the ring particles. So those are some of the
> investigations that CIRS can carry out.
>
> Now, in terms of atmospheres, when you're talking about Titan with
> CIRS we're mostly talking about the atmosphere. On the next slide
> there's a schematic diagram which shows the two main observing modes
> that CIRS can use, and quite simply, that means we are looking towards
> the surface or looking at a glancing grazing view through the side of
> the atmosphere and actually missing the surface of the planet. Both
> these views are good in different ways, because they both give us
> different information by different heights in the atmosphere. One of
> the tasks which CIRS can do very well is to test the temperature of
> different levels or layers in the atmosphere, and by looking through
> the, what we call the limb view, which is the grazing view, or through
> the nadir view, which means on a surface intersecting path we can see
> different levels of the atmosphere.
>
> On the next slide, actually on the right here you can see in the lower
> part an example of a CIRS limb view. This is not actual data, this is
> a prediction that was done before the launch of the spacecraft back in
> 1993, and of course we haven't actually had the chance to do any limb
> viewings on Titan yet, and we won't until the next Titan Pass TB. But
> the other thing I'm trying to show in this particular slide is the
> differences between Cassini and the CIRS instrument on Cassini and the
> IRIS spectrometer on Voyager. This is our predecessor and a lot of the
> same people were involved in the Voyager mission who are now on
> Cassini and now on CIRS, and this really shows a comparison between an
> IRIS limb view, which is in the lower part of the top panel, compared
> to the CIRS limb view. What you can see right there is that the CIRS
> has a much, much higher spectral resolution, and in fact those lines
> are so tightly nested together that really I would have to expand that
> plot to show you the individual spectral line, so we can see which
> correspondent individual rotations of those gases that are labeled on
> there. You can see that those were very roughly seen by IRIS, very
> crudely and very smoothed blurred-out spectrum that we saw, and it's
> going to be much, much sharper with Cassini CIRS and that means we can
> get information, not only about what gases are actually there, but we
> can begin to resolve how much there is of different types in the
> atmosphere. So CIRS is improved over IRIS in terms of sensitivity and
> its spectral resolution.
>
> On the next slide we show another aspect in which CIRS has progressed
> from the Voyager IRIS instrument and that is going into the far
> infrared here, going from 200 wave numbers down to 10 wave numbers,
> from 50 microns going right down to one millimeter. These rays of the
> spectrum cannot be seen at all by the Voyager IRIS instrument. They do
> not have the ability to detect that, but we can, and we're going to
> see lots more exciting things there. In these plots here, you see the
> same information displayed in two different ways. Really, this is just
> to show you the spectral lines of gases we are looking to see out
> there including water, H2O, methane, carbon monoxide, and hydrogen
> cyanide.
>
> Again, you can see some of those gases in other parts of the spectrum
> as well as here, and by looking at them in different parts of the
> spectrum again we can determine more information about how they're
> distributed with height and how they're distributed over the planet.
> This is a whole new part of the spectrum for CIRS and a lot of people
> are looking forward to what we know is going to be there and other
> things that I'm sure we don't know were gong to be there and we're
> going to find out pretty soon, in fact, on TA, this first flyby
> occurring today.
>
> On the next slide I'm just showing the temperature structure of the
> lower part of Titan's atmosphere, from the troposphere up to the start
> of the thermosphere, and as I said a short while ago, one of the
> primary tasks here is to measure this temperature profile, and in fact
> CIRS would cut through it right from the surface, but we can from just
> around the upper troposphere going right into the mesosphere, so from
> about 150 millibars right up to just a few microbars, a few millionths
> of a bar. In fact, we'll be supplemented by the radio science team,
> they are going to conduct radio occultation, they are going to refract
> their radio waves from behind Titan through the atmosphere and then
> receive them at the earth, and that will give us a lot of information
> about the lower part right from the 1.5 bar surface up to where the
> CIRS information starts, and in fact there will be a substantial
> overlap so that will enable us to get our stories straight and
> hopefully get a very good temperature profile. Unfortunately, the RSS
> team does not get very many chances to do what they're doing, only I
> think five or six chances in the mission, whereas we can do this type
> of temperature sensing on pretty much every pass, to some extent.
>
> Moving on to the next slide, this shows nine typical types of CIRS
> observations. Depending on how far we are from the planet we tend to
> do quite different things. You can see sort of a timeline running
> along the base of these three tiers here, from 40 hours closest
> approach to going into eight hours, going into 60 minutes, right down
> to Closest Approach at Titan , so I'll just briefly go through these.
> At the furthest point we do mid IR, mid Infrared integration, where
> you're basically staring at the planet of 1x10 array at vertical
> lines, just staring at the planet to try and build up a very accurate,
> low noise picture of what's there. As we get a little closer we go on
> to our temperature map and this is indicate by scanning motion. I
> don't know if you can remember on that TA movie which Trina showed,
> there was the CIRS arrays scanning across the planet, so what we're
> going to do here, in our mid-IR temperature map. In fact we do this on
> TA, is just to scan our entire instrument field up and down the planet
> six or seven passes to cover the whole planet and primarily again
> using these straight 1x10 arrays we're going to build up a nice
> detailed temperature map of the planet.
>
> Moving in further, far-IR integration what does that mean. That's
> concentrating with our circular array, which is shrunk to a useable
> size now that we are closer to the planet, and to really integrate the
> planet and look for new types of species, especially in that very long
> wavelength far infrared part of the spectrum, which I said is the new
> part, which will be seen by Voyager. We are going to be looking right
> there to try and find any new molecules and also to build up an
> accurate picture of the ones which we're expecting to see.
>
> **\<01:30\>**
>
> As we move in closer, going to our second tier, we have that
> temperature map in this case looking right around the edge of the
> planet. This is one of these limb views that I talked about where
> we're using a grazing view through the side of the atmosphere to kind
> of slice off the layers, almost like the layers of an onion and to
> check the temperatures and compositions at different heights in the
> atmosphere.
>
> A little closer in, we do our Far IR Nadir. This is a temperature map
> which we use our circular array to scan in a straight line very
> smoothly across the planet. This detector takes some time to do its
> work, so we can't scan too quickly. So we only have a chance to do one
> very slow scan, and in fact with this type of measurement we can also
> have a chance of detecting the surface at a wavelength around 500
> inverse centimeters, that's about 20 microns, which is beyond the ISS
> and VIMS temas from the atmosphere there. We basically can see the
> surface as well, so we'll be trying to, again, look for surface
> properties along the wavelength which should supplement the
> investigations being done by the other teams and help us pin down
> what's really on the surface.
>
> Then, as we go closer in we have three observations that are fairly
> similar. They're all Far IR limb measurements, there's a Far IR
> integration, limb scans, and then a temperature scan. Again, these are
> just very, as we're close to the planet just scanning right on the
> edge of the planet, kind of scanning up and down on the atmosphere, to
> again, build up a very accurate temperature profile, this time in the
> far infrared part with our circular arrays and then right around the
> closest approach in fact we only really get a chance to do this on one
> of the 44 Titan flybys and this is just to scan in really high
> resolution on the surface.
>
> So that just gives you sort of an overview. There's a lot of
> information contained there, but just to takeaway from that there are
> two main types of things that we do. We're surface looking at the
> surface in the Nadir type of integration, or we're looking through the
> edge of the atmosphere in a limb type view. Depending on what we're
> trying to do we'll either be steady, standing still, or we'll be
> scanning up and down.
>
> I'll just move across to the next slide. Now, I'm going to talk more
> specifically about TA pass, and we don't get the chance to do all
> those nine types of science on TA, but we do get the chance to do
> those of those types of science, and this shows our Mid IR Nadir
> temperature maps, so we're scanning our 1x10 arrays up and down the
> planet six or seven times, to really cover that whole hemisphere of
> the planet here. You can see the field of view starting off right in
> the center of Titan, where we pick up one of the other teams. We
> scanned on there to the lower right with a sort of a curving motion,
> and then we began our scan, and then we're just going to scan up and
> down until we get across there to the lower left.
>
> What this will do is give us a temperature map of the stratosphere,
> that's what we're going to have, hopefully by the end of day tomorrow,
> and we will really be able to get a very good north side picture of
> Titan's atmosphere better than any that's been done before. On T0 we
> were able to look at the southern hemisphere just from South pole to
> the equator but we weren't able to get right up to the north. This
> will be our first chance to get a global picture, and this should
> really help people pin down what's going on with Titan's atmosphere,
> what sort of circulation there is, and if the different molecules are
> being wafted around and how exactly they're being wafted. That's a
> very exciting piece of science for the dynamicists, and also for the
> Probe team , because the Huygens people are eagerly awaiting any
> information we can give them on the temperature structure of the
> atmosphere.
>
> On the next slide I've just given more details on scientific resume
> for Mid IR Nadir temperature map from 22 hours prior to closest
> approach to 16.25 hours and just details of what we're doing, again,
> and what heights in the atmosphere we were able to look out. In the
> last point I mentioned we were able to get the global variation of the
> stronger hydrocarbon admissions, such as acetylene, ethane, hydrogen
> cyanide, generated methane and so on. So that's primarily because
> we're not using our very highest resolution. We are using our lower
> resolution more comparable to the Voyager type of resolution for this
> map. The reason we're doing that is because we're moving quite quickly
> and we don't have time to spend long enough to build up our highest
> spectral resolution, and for the purposes of temperature mapping we
> don't need our highest spectral resolution. One of the things about
> CIRS is that we can tune our coarseness of our spectral resolution
> depending on what science we're looking to do. So for this one we're
> at a moderate spectral resolution, but we will be able to see the
> stronger molecules which were seen by IRIS and build up a global
> picture.
>
> On the next slide, I just basically mention that the point the probe
> will benefit from the information which we find on it about the
> temperature structure of the atmosphere they have a lot of concerns
> about---not concerns, but their mission is obviously dependent on what
> altitude their parachutes are going to open at, and anything we can do
> to pin that down more narrowly will obviously help set their minds at
> ease, ...
>
> Moving on to the next slide. This shows our far infrared Nadir
> composition integration so in this particular piece of science we're
> just staring at one part of the planet. We're staring off center, we
> won't stare close to the edge, but not right on the atmosphere. The
> reason we do this is because if we look through a slightly deeper
> piece of the atmosphere which we get looking toward the edge of the
> planet, we see slightly more of this titanium air in between us and
> the surface of the planet, and that gives us a stronger signal. So
> we're using our large far infrared detector and still quite far out
> from Titan, and in this case we're going to use our highest possible
> spectral resolution, go to our finest possible picture of the spectrum
> to really look for new species if we can, especially in Far Infrared
> part of the spectrum not seen by Voyager.
>
> On the next slide, again, more details, just a breakdown of what we
> were doing, it's a four hour integration, 30 degrees South with the
> highest spectral resolution and we're going to really go after those
> molecules in the Far IR part of the spectrum again, that was not seen
> by Voyager, and hopefully see some new things there, as well as
> building up a good picture.
>
> Again, on the next new graph, I mentioned that CIRS as well as having
> these two time observations where we're in the driving seat also
> riding along with the VIMS and ISS and UVIS instruments, when they
> have their observation time, we can't ride along with RADAR, but we
> can ride along with the other three types of the ORS instruments.
> We're looking forward especially to riding along with Kevin on VIMS
> because they're getting a great view of the probe landing site, we'll
> be right over that as well, and get a chance to determine the
> atmospheric temperature structure and composition right over the probe
> landing site.
>
> That brings me to the end of my presentation. There are a couple more
> slides following, for anyone who's interested, and it just gives more
> detailed information about the instrument. But I'm not going to go
> into that right now, unless you want me to. So that's the end of what
> I have to say for CIRS and I'll be happy to answer any questions
> people may have. I've gone through this quite quickly, but I'm sure
> there's more I can say.

J. Malding-Kinney This is Jenny Malding Kinney from Atlanta, Georgia. I
was not quite following exactly what you were saying when you were doing
the Nadir geometry through the far IR through a higher density of the
atmosphere. What was the rationale behind that?

C. Nixon This is going back a couple of graphs to the picture I showed
with the green circular field of view towards the edge of the planet.

J. Malding-Kinney Correct.

C. Nixon The thing to think about is that Titan is surrounded by a shell
of atmosphere, and if we're looking straight on towards the very center
of the planet, we're looking through the regular thickness of the
atmosphere, well further and further towards the edge we're looking at a
kind of slanted path, towards the edge, which means we look through a
deeper distance of atmosphere. This is really the same thing on the
earth that I'm getting toward sunset when you see the sun going down
towards the horizon and the sun gets redder and redder, and because the
sun is going behind a greater depth of atmosphere, the path of air that
you're looking through becomes greater and greater, and the sun becomes
redder due to the dust and soil in the atmosphere. So that's effectively
what we're doing, except we're looking from the outside in instead of
from the inside out. Does that help you?

J. Malding-Kinney Yes, thank you very much.

T. Ray I think that "path length" is the key phrase there. If you're
looking towards the edge you're just really looking through a lot more.

M All piled up.

T. Ray Any other questions? Are there any questions in general, not
specifically for our two atmospheric specialists, but any questions on
Titan?

K. Baines ... there's a lot of good synergies between VIMS and CIRS and
between all of the instruments on board, and one thing I think it will
be useful for---and Connor you can comment on this---is that you guys
are going to be doing temperatures over the whole planet as a function
of altitude, so you've got a temperature field over the whole planet and
from that, I think you mentioned, you can get wind, that is in
equilibrium it was called thermal winds and if you give a scientist the
temperature structure over the planet and how it varies with latitude,
they can back out of that, using very simple equations, the expected
wind speeds. That's called a thermal wind. But one thing you don't get
is they don't have the Fiducial mark, where to start, what is the wind
at a certain level, and so by looking at cloud motions we can give them
that first calibration mark but what the winds are at a particular place
in the atmosphere and then from that they can just extrapolate and
figure out winds all over the place, throughout the whole atmosphere. Is
that right, Connor?

C. Nixon Yes, you're absolutely right, Kevin. We need the starting point
and that's why we use your tracking. Yes, that's going to be really
useful for us. We're going to get the 3D temperature and wind picture,
but we need our starting point.

T. Ray I think that's a really important point, with Titan in
particular, is any one of these instruments alone wouldn't be able to
figure it out. Titan is complex, it's a very complex body, and if you
just had a RADAR, or if you just had a VIMS, or if you just had a CIRS,
you wouldn't be able to figure it out. It really takes all of them
looking together to figure it out, and in fact, one of the best quotes I
heard right after the T-zero flyby was one of the eminent scientists
from the imaging team said, "Well, it's a good thing we've got everybody
looking and we've got 45 flybys, because that's what it's going to take
to figure this out."

C. Nixon That's right.

R. Warren I have a question here. Will any interaction between the
atmosphere and the magnetic field of either Saturn or Titan be detected?
This is Ray Warren in Colorado.

K. Baines What did you ask?

T. Ray The atmosphere of Titan and the magnetic field of Saturn.

K. Baines Yes, there's a huge amount of stuff going on with magnetic
field that Bill Kurth and those guys that we heard from on Friday we
heard from them. The magnetic field of Saturn and we're you're going to
see how Titan diverts that magnetic field and has it go around it. And
the atmosphere of Titan, its molecules lots of gas molecules and those
things get ionized by processes of the magnetic field, so you have your
self-generated field around Titan due to these different processes, and
so then Titan acquires sort of a magnetic field within the other
magnetic field, so there's a big interplay going on all the time between
the Saturn rotating field hitting Titan and Titan getting its own little
temporary field as the major part of the mag field comes across, and so
it's going to be a very interesting dance that they're going to be
looking for, and they're very intrigued by this.

T. Ray Yes, they've seen it before. They understand that Titan, just by
being Titan and having these free ions in the atmosphere and that sort
of thing, as Titan moves through Saturn's magnetic field, the magnetic
field lines of Saturn get draped around Titan and there's this little
magnetic pressure wave in front, a little bow shock, and there's this
wake behind Titan that Saturn sweeps its magnetic field around once
every ten hours. So really, Saturn drags its own magnetic field across
Titan very, very quickly compared to how fast Titan is moving.

K. Baines They're really intrigued by that, and they expect it to be
pretty pliable ...

T. Ray Very interactive.

K. Baines Yeah, weaving in and out.

T. Ray We don't know yet if Titan has its own internal magnetic field.
We are hoping, I mean, the magnetometer guys, they're going to be
looking tonight, so that would be a terrific result to come out of the
first Titan flyby, an internal magnetic field joining Ganymede and a few
others. Oh, but there's just too much. There's so much that can happen
after tonight.

K. Baines We don't have all the guys in the room right now, but there's
like six different major instruments that do this kind of thing, and
that's a big deal.

P. Wiggins This is sort of a generic thing, the correct pronunciation
for the probe is Huygens, Hygan's or something else?

T. Ray Well, this is what I've heard, I've heard from the people in the
Netherlands that no matter how hard Americans try they can't do it
correctly, but actually it's very guttural, it's like a Huygens, so
Huygens is how we typically say it.

P. Wiggins So, Huygens would be acceptable?

T. Ray Huygens is acceptable. Like I said, it's Huygens and you have to
get it from deep in your throat. The answer is we can't do it correctly.

P. Wiggins All right. I appreciate it. This is Patrick Wiggins from
Utah.

T. Ray That's how we typically say it here on the project, the Huygens
mission, Christian Huygens.

K. Baines ... the Cassini mission, it's the Cassini-Huygens mission.

T. Ray Typically because we are a joint mission, a partnership with ESA,
a lot of people get in the habit of calling it the Cassini mission, but
it's actually the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan.

Anything else?

J. Malding-Kinney This is Jenny from Atlanta again. What is the average
time that it's going to take to get these transmissions back from the
Cassini-Huygens probe?

T. Ray It takes about an hour and a half for the light to travel from
the spacecraft to the earth, and typically when we fill up the solid
state recorder it takes over nine hours to empty that out to the ground.
So in fact every day of the mission is spent doing roughly 15 hours of
observations of Saturn or the Saturn system, and we do nine hours of
down link. Then for a Titan flyby we actually spend more like 20 or 25
or 30 hours doing observation and then down link it all at the end.

W Trina, you might mention that's because you have to turn the whole
spacecraft to turn the antenna.

T. Ray Absolutely. All the instruments are body fixed to the spacecraft,
that's a really good point. It's sort of like their backs are all
\<gap\> to the spacecraft and if you want to turn you have to turn the
whole spacecraft to take a picture or you have to turn the whole
spacecraft and flip it over to down link to the earth. In fact, my
particular job on Cassini is, as I said, to work with the Titan Orbiter
Science Team, that's called TOST for short, where we all get in a room
and we argue, well we discuss about the relative science merits of
everyone's observations, and of course, everyone wants all the time to
be doing their science, and so we have to learn how to share. You'd
think for a group of adults that learning to share would be an easy
lesson, but I can tell you from personal experience that it is in fact
quite challenging to teach them to share.

K. Baines I've got to say on this mission, I've been involved in other
missions too, and when you get 100-200 scientists, in fact, we have
what, 200 ...

T. Ray Over 200.

K. Baines Over 200 scientists from all around the world involved in one
mission and all trying to point this spacecraft in their preferred
direction, and unfortunately we could not line up all the instruments to
be bore-sighted together, and instruments are all over the place
pointing in different directions, and I think, and I've experienced
other missions I won't name, that this went a hundred times more
smoothly than I've seen other missions, in trying to get reasoning, and
it's because everybody from the get-go actually saw the whole mission as
a whole, they recognized there are 44 orbits and not just one orbit. And
on other missions it's like, we know we've got a dozen orbits coming up
but we want to all assume that we only have one, and if we don't get our
best observation on the very first orbit, we're going to scream and cry
and get all upset, and they did. This thing a lot of people said, you
know I can wait for the third orbit, or I can wait for the fourth orbit
or fifth orbit to get my thing. I'll assume the space craft is going to
stay alive, and then we got the solutions very quickly, I think,
compared to what I've seen on other missions. I've been very pleased by
this.

T. Ray Yes. I would agree with Kevin. Getting over that first hurdle was
the hardest, and in fact, when we did the Jupiter flyby I thought that
was a huge effort in moving all the science teams forward and
understanding the limitations of the spacecraft and sharing. The Titan
group was actually the first group to form, and the way that we actually
planned the mission is we didn't give every day to all 200 scientists,
because that's impossible, you'll never get anywhere, what we did is we
broke the tour up into segments that we gave to the instruments and the
scientists that care about that topic. So for example, all the Titan
scientists get together in a group, so that's only 20 or 30, and they
work all the Titan flybys. All the Ring scientists get together in a
group and they work the rings, where the rings have the best
observations. So we split it up into six groups: Titan, all the other IC
satellites, Rings, the atmosphere, and then a magnetosphere, and then
finally what we called cross-discipline, which became everything else.

K. Baines It worked magnificently.

T. Ray It really worked.

K. Baines We were able to get to know each other. I think you're right,
Jupiter was a fantastic way to get the right spirit, I talked several
times about that in different meetings, that the main thing in this
mission is getting the right spirit, because if you start off with the
idea that that guy stole my data or something and it will degenerate
really quickly. So we did Jupiter first, and as I said, it was an
amazing lesson. People worked together. We got great data down. Nobody
got exactly what they wanted, but everybody got enough and everybody
understood and respected the other guy's instruments and realized it was
giving enough good data, and everybody was pretty happy. That set the
tone then for this humongous problem of how do you observe Saturn with a
spacecraft where everything's bolted down and we're all in this rowboat
together all trying to steer the rowboat in different directions at the
same time, and it worked out very well.

One of the lessons learned, though, for future missions, if we do get
the JIMO or something in the first, is we want that Scan Platform where
you can just independently move it apart from the spacecraft and maybe
even several scan platforms on big missions like JIMO down the road. You
really, really save money and the planning process would be one-tenth as
hard if the instruments could move independently of each other and go
see things.

T. Ray The number one lesson learned from this mission is a scan
platform is critical for this kind of thing, because if you think about
it, remember how I said we'd spend roughly 15 hours every day doing
observations and nine hours every day down linking, if we had a scan
platform we would increase instantaneously to 24 hours a day we'd be
doing science observations, to increase by half.

K. Baines Just giving people a flavor and example of the INMS and the
RADAR are two examples of instruments that are orthogonal, that is
pointed in completely different directions from the remote sensing
things that Connor or I have been talking about. Now Connor's instrument
and the VIMS instrument are bore-sighted, so we take data
simultaneously. That's why we talked about ride-alongs. There we've
gotten great, ISS the same thing. But if you're trying to sniff the
atmosphere, that's in a completely different direction, you've got to
turn the spacecraft in a direction that prevents us taking images or
spectra, and when do they want to turn around and sniff the atmosphere?

T. Ray Right at closest appraoch

K. Baines Right at closest approach, so right when we get our best
observations and we have to abort and say, okay, you guys get to sniff
and we'll not, and won't do anything. Radar is the same thing, RADAR
points in a whole different direction and when they get their
observations nobody else can do anything. Then the other example is
radio occultations and gravity things. Those observations, those are
sort of solo things and nobody else can take data, so when we set
...---is it 44 encounters? I forgot.

T. Ray Forty-five.

K. Baines We thought we were steeped in riches here, but we quickly
realized during TOST that really we wish we had 90, because you really
can't do everything in 44, given all these different constraints on how
you use the spacecraft.

T. Ray But I would like to put in a plug for our next series of Titan
observations. I think Kevin said it beautifully; we did have to learn
how to share and in the first ten Titan flybys that go all the way out
to the middle and end of 2005, is where everybody gets their best shot.
So right now we have sort of a shared observation between ORS and RADAR;
December 13^th^ we have an all ORS flyby; on February 14 of next year we
have radio science; then in March of next year we have a maps flyby, in
fact, we don't get our next RADAR observation until late 2005.

K. Baines That was a big change from the original plan. The original
plan was that every orbit you get by Titan you're going to use that
RADAR and really map it out, but when you have 250 scientists, even the
director of JPL running the RADAR doesn't have his way. So luckily he
was magnanimous and was able to back off and we eventually got a plan
that worked. But anybody with a position of power, let's say the
director of JPL, could have stuck their feet in the sand and their heels
in and said no. I want to do it. We lugged our RADAR all the way there
and I only need to be on for half an hour every month, why can't I get
my half hour every month? Well, it happens to be a close approach to
Titan. Well! Luckily, he did not do that and that's how I think we got a
great mission in the end.

T. Ray It's going to be exciting today, don't get me wrong, it's going
to be phenomenal, but it's going to be exciting in December and it's
going to be exciting next year.

K. Baines Yes. In terms of RADAR we only get what, 19% of the planet.

T. Ray About 20%. We get about 1% every time we do SARS, so today we get
a little bit less than 1%, because they didn't get a full ten-hour
flyby.

K. Baines ... 100 kilometer or whatever it is, 100 meter resolution ...

T. Ray Yes, probably something like that.

K. Baines So, after we're all done in four years, only 20%, and this is
the impetus then for ...

T. Ray Titan mapper.

K. Baines ... well a future mission or an extended mission for us. We're
extending another couple of years and one of the main evidences is let's
go ahead and really try to do the RADAR, although I'm sure a lot of the
time this will have other uses for the spacecraft. ... so we'll just
keep going and ... it's going to be a while until everybody is
satisfied, that's for sure.

T. Ray Any other questions?

W Is the weather still looking okay?

T. Ray The last we heard is that we still have light rain in Madrid, but
that was before this telecon started. Light rain means intermittent data
drop-outs, and so we'll all be---it's in Madrid, Spain, so if anybody
has access to the weather report in Madrid, Spain, that's what we're
looking for.

M I looked it up while we were talking and it's getting worse.

T. Ray Well, thanks very much.

K. Baines Everybody should go over there with hair dryers and start
pointing to the sky ... out there.

T. Ray It's getting worse, well, you know ...

M Previous probes have had a scanning platform, what was that design
concession that gave us the configuration we have today?

T. Ray Money.

M Okay.

K. Baines This was all 1990 or 1991 when early on in Dan Golden's tenure
it was better for us and cheaper, and we were this big elephant, the
white elephant on NASA's planetary program, this \$1.6 billion
spacecraft, and all of the money had to be spent about that time and we
had to, very early on right after CRAF was canceled, CRAF was the sister
mission to Cassini, where we had a mission and it was going to be two
spacecraft for the price of one at one point, but that ended up not
working out and that got canceled. So now all of a sudden Cassini looked
more expensive because we got rid of the sister mission, so now all that
development work goes into one mission, and now we looked really
expensive. The administrator saw that and said, look, you guys, I demand
that you keep the cost down to a certain level, I think it was \$1.6
billion, and you can't spend a dime more than that throughout the whole
mission, including the operations that we're doing now in the year 2004,
and in 1990 he wanted it in real year dollars and we pointed out that
1990 dollars doesn't buy you much in 2004 or 2008, but he didn't take
that as an excuse. He said no, I want you guys to figure out a way to do
it. We had to come up with a way to do it, and the only way that we
could come up with, we did several things. One of the things we had to
do was say, look, we need to get rid of that scan platform, that saved
us I don't know how much, maybe \$10 million or \$5 million, something
like that.

T. Ray It saved a considerable---within the tens of millions.

K. Baines So the only thing that scientists could really do to impact
the savings was to get rid of that scan platform, but other systems on
the spacecraft also saved but we had to contribute something and we
couldn't get away scot-free, and so we gave up the scan platform when we
realized that actually it's a benefit, by the way. Being bolted down on
a big behemoth of a spacecraft means that you are very stable, this
thing does not vibrate at all, and it's amazing, once you get pointed
you are pointed, but inertia being inertia, means that now it takes a
lot of effort to get pointed somewhere else. But the point is there are
some benefits of this, crystal clear pictures.

T. Ray Yes, this spacecraft without the ... platform and everything
being body fixed and with the inertia of such a big spacecraft, once you
actually get on point, the image stability is beautiful.

K. Baines It's better than anything we've ever had so far.

T. Ray It's better than anything we've ever had ...

K. Baines So there are benefits. There are always silver linings in
everything.

T. Ray But it is funny, I'll share with you a story. When these things
happen you get interviewed by newspapers and all this kind of thing, and
they asked one of our eminent disciplined scientists, Dr. Jonathan
Lunine, if he could add one thing to the spacecraft what would he add?
He would add this mass analyzer and he went into this thing about this
new instrument that he'd add on to it. Then they asked me what I would
add, and I said, "scan platform." He was all like, oh, yes, that would
be much better.

K. Baines That's right. We all pretty much, just the flexibility it
gives you is incredible. But on the other hand, what also benefits us is
having four years to do everything, four years and 44 encounters. It's
not like Voyager. Voyager, one pass and you're done. Here, you get
multiple encounters, and that was a rational for why the scan platform
you can get rid of it, because after all what can these scientists
possibly do in 44 revs. Well, we quickly learned that we wished we had a
lot more, but anyway it worked out okay. We did save the money and the
mission did continue. It was a real threat back there that if we
couldn't do it, Golden was going to cancel us, right back there in the
'90 and '91 timeframe. He didn't cancel us and we saved the money and
here we are today.

T. Ray Yes. Any other questions?

John I've got a quick question. John Bonidais, a SC member in Alabama
also I'm a moderator of the Cassini chat in the IRC free.net, so if
anybody's interested in going in to chat there. I've got a lot of
questions about the oceans of methane on the images, in particular there
was an infrared image, I believe, that was released on the 24^th^ of
October that had, I believe it was the Xanadu image, they described it,
PIA06107 image, and it showed a lot of marked areas of very light areas
and then all of a sudden a definite line or demarcation, you might say,
of darkness. Could that possibly be an ocean of methane, or do you have
any idea from imaging and sensory data from there?

T. Ray You're talking about the sharp demarcation between the dark and
the light?

John Yes, that's correct. I've been looking at that image a lot up close
and so forth and there's been a lot of speculation regarding whether
that was actually an image, it looks like a coastline, in a sense.

T. Ray We know that we're definitely seeing down to the surface for
that, that dark and light demarcation is definitely surface. In the
image that they released on Xanadu at the bottom is our familiar South
Pole Cloud and just to give you some orientation, the bright spot in the
middle, the Xanadu, the "H" is off to the right and you can just see the
tip of the "H" off to the upper right, and when we flyby tonight the
data will all be to the left of this. You'll see the Xanadu and to the
left.

John Where's the Huygens site on here?

T. Ray The Huygens site is right on the very, very left-hand side of
that image, in that dark/light region way, way on the left.

K. Baines You can't really tell it's there ...

T. Ray Well, you know what, I haven't heard anything about whether or
not that's an edge of an ocean, but I'll tell you I'm sure we'll be
hearing speculation about that over the next two days. I haven't heard
anything in particular, though.

K. Baines I'm just looking at this thing, and I've seen this before,
I've been so busy looking at VIMS data, I just didn't look at this, but
is this the way it's showing up here, Trina? It looks to me like you
have linear features coming from the bright area down into that thing,
as if there is rivers and things. I don't know if everybody is talking
about that, but it's ..

T. Ray ...

K. Baines The more I look at this thing, the more I see these linears
Obviously, this is taken further away, ...

T. Ray This is taken at 700,000 kilometers.

K. Baines Yes, so now I'm really excited about what we'll see with VIMS
that big mosaic that we're going to do ...

T. Ray Five and a half hours from now I'm going to be a wreck. I'm
already a wreck.

K. Baines This is a great job---I hadn't seen it. I'm glad you called
this thing. It's amazing. VIMS team, I do know that we have a fuzzy view
of this, I saw this last night, and now I can say oh, that's what it
looks like. Web site ... but we see very clearly this dichotomy of a
bright area and we see a dark area to the left, and in fact, now I see
this picture, and I say, wow, OK we're seeing it on and and that's where
we started looking at the spectrum because it looks so different than
anything else. Right in the middle

T. Ray That does look like a little ... reflection there, doesn't it?

K. Baines ... off to the right of center. It turned out to be a very
bright pixel and our poor resolution that we have from last night, and I
wanted to see that better and now I see it better here, but it looks
like there may be a couple of differences from everything else around
it. As we get closer and isolate it better, I'm a lot more worried it's
going to be off to the side, that might be something that we want to
look at. But it certainly does have the impression of a continent in the
middle and seas off to the left. That's a very good ...

T. Ray Or maybe the other way around. Maybe the seas are the bright part
and the ...

K. Baines Maybe. Tonight, though, I suspect that with all the different
people looking, we're going to know within a few days exactly what we're
looking at here, not exactly, but a lot better.

T. Ray I think there's going to be outrageous speculation over the next
few days.

K. Baines Yes. ...

M Solar System Ambassador out of Patterson California. After the last
press conference there were a lot of questions about the areas that we
had imaged on the last flyby that looked as if, if everybody was saying
it was definitely the ground, we're imaging the ground, but it looks
fuzzy and cloud-like and a lot of folks were talking about that. Well,
in this image we're all looking at right now we can definitely see in
that light, that albedo versus the light area, that it's very clearly
delineation of ground area, but in the light area near the center it
seems to have that fuzzy look to it again. Are we sure that's not ground
haze of some kind?

K. Baines Well, fog is one of the things that people keep talking about.

T. Ray Very, very low-lying fog would be something that people are
talking about.

K. Baines There are ways to speculate how you get fog down there. We had
this methane cloud that's up high, but there's other stuff down there,
there's ...

T. Ray The thing is that VIMS should penetrate low-lying fog.

K. Baines Again, if the fog is fog, then that should be a pretty big
particle and we may be stopped. The one thing I would have thought was
in the 5-micron images we would see some dichotomy between what that
looks like and low-lying fog in the thing next door.

T. Ray I thought the blue was ice. When it's pure blue like that,
doesn't that tell you that you don't have low-lying fog?

K. Baines There was nothing that we saw on the first pass that showed us
fog, I mean, nothing jumped out. So that's why we were saying it's not
fog. However, in my mind if you had a really thick, one meter thick
little dry ice kind of thing you see in the movies, that's kind of lying
there, then maybe we wouldn't see that and so that could explain the
fuzziness, in some sense, if it was just like a meter up and it was just
billowing around.

M There wasn't a lot of delineation between what we were being told were
the \<gap\> that were being imaged, yet here you can see some very clear
surface delineation but some of that misty, un-delineated area. So this
is very exciting folks.

T. Ray Oh yes, it's very exciting.

J. Cassy I have a question for you. This is Jim Cassy from Springville,
Missouri. Is there a particular timeframe that you expect the best
images to come down?

T. Ray Well, they sort of get better as you go on, so what's going to
happen in the beginning is you're going to have these images taken while
we're doing the observations that are far away, so as you go through the
night the images are going to get higher and higher and higher and
higher resolution until you have your very highest resolution at about
10:30 tonight, in terms of the combination between resolution and
stability, because remember we had to transition to thrusters. Once we
transitioned to thrusters then you're getting higher resolution because
you're getting closer, but you have to take shorter exposure images.

K. Baines We're skimming along the ground so fast.

T. Ray Right. Exactly. Also, since you're skimming you're taking very
short images and what they do is instead of taking one image sort of at
the limit of the skimming, they take even shorter images and they take
them in sets of triplets of three. Then they sum them on the ground to
get a better image. So from sort of 10:30 to 11:30 to 12:00 your
resolution is getting better but you start doing things with a camera so
that you can make the image on the ground. So you're going to start
taking triplets, you're going to start deliberately smearing the images
so that you can have a flat field, you're going to take images of the
haze so you can subtract it out, so you're going to start getting some
funnier images that don't look as good as you would think, but once they
get them underground and process them, they'll get better. So I think
probably the best images are going to hit between 9:30 and 10:30 to
11:00 tonight.

M That's Pasadena time, right?

T. Ray Pasadena time, right.

M Thank you.

T. Ray Then RADAR comes on after that and they'll be processing all
night.

K. Baines I've heard that by Wednesday morning they'll have
scatterometer and stuff, but the actual cool looking RADAR pass will be
out by Thursday in that process.

T. Ray Anything else? Terrific. I want to thank everybody, and in
particular thank Dr. Baines and Dr. Nixon for joining us today. We
really appreciate you guys taking time out, and a very exciting day for
you all to talk to us today. We really appreciate it and hope that you
can come back and give us some Titan-A results once they've been
published.

K. Baines I'd love to do it.

T. Ray Thank you everyone for calling in. Our next telecon will be the
last Tuesday of November, and again, that's going to be all about the
magnetosphere of Saturn.

M Thank you very much.

T. Ray You're welcome.

M Thank you.

W Thank you.