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| Episode 15, Synthetic Aperture Radar | Dec 07, 2011 4:27 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Yay episode 15! This is Selenis 35, who we left on her way to the spaceport at the end of episode 13.
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Seems like I'm always writing about Saturn's crazy ice-shooting moon Enceladus (the last time was back in October, for instance). That's partly because it *is* so crazy (shoots ice particles out into a ring around Saturn, is coated in up to 300 feet of snow, etc), and partly because the Cassini spacecraft is often cruising around there getting some amazing photos.
Now Cassini's broken out a new trick on Enceladus: capturing swaths of the moon's topography in extremely high detail with synthetic aperture radar.
This Synthetic Aperture Radar ("SAR") stuff is pretty nifty; I can't make heads or tales of the fairly technical Wikipedia page on it there, but it seems to involve getting really detailed image data back by bouncing radio waves off the surface, instead of just taking photos or something. Here's a killer image of the Venusian surface made using SAR data the Magellan spacecraft got in 1991 (the globe shape and color are simulated)--the radar imaging cut right through the incredibly thick cloud layer that completely covers the planet:
image by NASA (source)
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