Physics – Optics
Scientific paper
May 2009
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009aas...21421905r&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #214, #219.05; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.726
Physics
Optics
Scientific paper
Titan, Saturn's largest moon, stands out in our solar system as the sole moon with a substantial atmosphere. Conditions in Titan's troposphere are near the triple point of methane, the second most abundant component of its atmosphere. Much of the interesting weather phenomena on Earth occur because conditions are near the triple point of water. Our understanding of Titan has shifted considerably in the past 10-15 years. While once we thought of Titan's troposphere as a quiescent place, lacking in clouds or localized weather and only changing subtly on long seasonal timescales, we now understand the troposphere to be a dynamic system with significant weather events regularly occurring on top of the backdrop of dramatic seasonal changes. Much of this new understanding of Titan comes from ground-based observations, especially adaptive optics imaging with large telescopes. In more recent years the Cassini spacecraft has returned close-up high-resolution images of Titan's weather, but even in the era of Cassini ground-based observations have played a crucial role in creating a well-sampled temporal record of Titan's weather. Cassini's infrequent flybys have caused it to miss some of the most dramatic weather events. Additionally the temporally more complete record of Titan's weather from groundbased observations has been important to teasing out statistical trends in cloud activity. Although the observational record of Titan's weather covers only roughly a third of its 30-year seasonal cycle, Titan's atmospheric processes appear to be more closely analogous to those of Earth than any other object in our solar system. I will discuss our current understanding of Titan's methane weather and the critical role that adaptive optics observations on large telescopes (W.M. Keck II and Gemini North) have played in developing that understanding.
This work is supported by the NASA Planetary Astronomy program under Cooperative Agreement Number NNX07AK74GS01.
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