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| Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging of Iapetus |
Richard D. West1, S. Ostro1, M. A. Janssen1, B. Stiles1, K. Kelleher1, Y. Anderson1, R. Boehmer1, P. Callahan1, Y. Gim1, G. Hamilton1, W. T. Johnson1, C. Veeramachaneni1, Cassini RADAR Team
1Jet Propulsion Laboratory. |
| Presentation Number: 41.03 |
| On Sep. 10, 2007, the Cassini spacecraft will conduct its last targeted flyby of Iapetus during the four year prime mission. On this flyby, the radar will collect a unique active and passive data set. Unlike all other radar data collections during non-Titan flybys, the spacecraft will be close enough to Iapetus to permit synthetic aperture imaging of portions of the facing hemisphere. The range of 20,000 km during this observation makes it similar to high altitude SAR imaging performed on some Titan flybys (e.g., T25 and T29). The imaged area lies mostly on the dark hemisphere of Iapetus, which will also be the night side at the time of this observation. The best active mode resolution will be about 2 km by 6 km. The passive beam footprints will be about 120 km across, while Iapetus is 718 km in radius. At the center of the scan, some high-bandwidth altimetry data will be collected. This presentation will examine the performance trade-offs made in the observation plan, and show some early quick-look results. The combined active and passive data sets have the potential to complement the optical and infrared imaging of Iapetus and shed more light on the structure and composition of the surface. The Iapetus SAR images will also be the first of an icy satellite for which high-resolution optical images are available, and therefore will provide useful lessons for interpretation of Titan SAR images. This work is supported by the NASA Cassini Program at JPL-CalTech. |
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