[Russia Today] MUST SEE! Stunning NASA image reveals surface of Saturn's Titan moon

Russia Today ^ | November 6, 2014 | Russia Today

[lbryce]

New images from NASA have captured the beautiful golden reflection of the sun on the polar sea of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. It is the latest image from a collaborative four year mission studying the Saturnine system.

The mirror-like reflection, known as the specular point, is in the south of Titan's largest sea, Kraken Mare – just north of an island archipelago separating two separate parts of the sea. To the human eye, this would appear as a haze but through Cassini’s Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS), “real color information” is provided in wavelengths that correspond to atmospheric windows, making the moon’s surface visible.

"The highest resolution data from this flyby — the area seen immediately to the right of the sunlight — cover the labyrinth of channels that connect Kraken Mare to another large sea, Ligeia Mare. Ligeia Mare itself is partially covered in its northern reaches by a bright, arrow-shaped complex of clouds. The clouds are made of liquid methane droplets, and could be actively refilling the lakes with rainfall," stated NASA.

Titan is the only other body in the solar system known to have a liquid surface like Earth. Instead of water, the lakes and seas are made up of hydrocarbons, organic compounds that also rain down from the clouds that cover the moon. For this reason, scientists think that because Earth and Titan share so much in atmospheric composition, the Saturn’s moon might hold clues as to how the primitive Earth evolved into a life-bearing planet.

[William Tell]

I think I'm getting a much better feel for this.

Given the incredible precision and accuracy of atomic clocks, one might be able to use the phase of the microwave transmissions from a spacecraft as the signals arrive at two earth stations to calculate position.

At roughly one nanosecond per foot of travel, the two stations might be able to resolve the difference in distance to the spacecraft to within a foot using a 1 GHz signal.

The angular precision of the position of the spacecraft in the sky might then be accurate to one foot in about 8000 miles. This would pin down the position of the craft to perhaps 1000 feet at a distance of 8,000,000 miles, or, extrapolated to a distance of 800 million miles, the position could be determined to within 100,000 feet, or about 20 miles.

Perhaps such a system could be ten times more precise than this, yielding an accuracy of 2 miles.

I can see where this would suffice for just about any purpose. Now I need to find out if this is really what happens.